Rachel Simon

As she explains in Riding the Bus with My Sister, Rachel Simon was born in Newark, New Jersey and raised in various towns across New Jersey and Pennsylvania. She was interested in writing from a very young age and spent must of her childhood composing letters and stories on her typewriter. After her parents’ tumultuous divorce and her mother’s remarriage to an abusive conman, she went away to boarding school and then to Bryn Mawr College, where she studied anthropology. Her once-troubled relationship with her family is the foundation of much of her work, including Riding the Bus with My Sister. After graduation, Simon took a series of jobs, including as a paralegal and bookstore manager, before getting a graduate degree in creative writing. She published her first book, the short story collection Little Nightmares, Little Dreams, in 1990 and her second, the novel The Magic Touch, in 1994. After writing a column for The Philadelphia Inquirer and teaching creative writing for several years, she spent 1999 riding the buses around Reading, Pennsylvania with her sister Beth. Based on this experience, she published Riding the Bus with My Sister in 2002. This was when her career particularly took off: she became a popular speaker about disability and continued to write about the subject, including in her bestselling 2011 novel The Story of Beautiful Girl, which tells the story of a couple with disabilities who are locked in an institution in the 1960s but fall in love and escape. Simon lives in Delaware, where she continues to write and teach.