Ann Brashares Biography
Ann Brashares grew up in Chevy Chase, Maryland with
her three brothers and attended a Quaker school in the DC area called Sidwell
Friends. She studied Philosophy at Barnard College, part of Columbia University
in New York City. Expecting to continue studying philosophy in graduate school,
Ann took a year off after college to work as an editor, hoping to save money for
school. Loving her job, she never went to graduate school, and instead, remained
in New York City and worked as an editor for many years. Ann made the transition
from editor to full-time writer with her first novel, The Sisterhood of the
Traveling Pants.
When asked where the idea for the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants came
from she replies:
"It started with a conversation. A woman I used to work
with, a dear friend, Jodi Anderson, talked about a summer where she and her
friends had shared a pair of pants that wound up being lost. It was sad, but I
loved the idea - a concrete thing in the middle of a great big, amorphous, rich
world of fiction."
Brashares and her husband, 42-year-old portrait painter Jacob Collins,
live in a four-story building in the East 60s in New York with their three
children, Susannah, Nate and Sam, who range in age from about 5 to 11. Jacob
runs a classical painting school called the Water Street Atelier out of the
house with about a dozen students at at time. In late 2006 the New York Times
described him as "the ringleader of a group of youngish painters devoted to
classical techniques" with a style that is "so out, it may be in again". He was
recently named one of the art world’s most powerful people by Art & Auction
magazine, and lately his paintings have been selling for as much as $125,000.
They met when Brashares was 18 and he was 21. He was a junior at Columbia, and
she was a freshman at Barnard; his father, Arthur Collins, was one of her
philosophy professors. During their first encounter, in the library, he sketched
her portrait.
Brashares' books in addition to the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants books include Forever in Blue, The Last Summer (of You and Me), and My Name is Memory.
This biography was last updated on 06/19/2011.
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