Alma Flor Ada is a noted children´s author and translator.
Raised in a family of storytellers, Alma Flor Ada grew up listening to tales of all kinds, from folktales to stories about Cuban history to fantasies about other worlds. Her grandmother taught her to read before she was three by writing the names of flowers and plants on the ground with a stick. Yet Ada only began writing books when she became a teacher. Unsatisfied with the materials she was given, she began to write her own. A professor in one of her college classes saw what she was writing and helped her to get it published, and soon she was writing textbooks. One day, however, her four-year-old daughter told her that the textbooks she was writing were "ugly" and asked her to write books for her instead. "At that time," Ada says, "I didn't know what I know now. I didn't know that everyone is an author; that everyone has stories to tell. I was very shy and so I started by telling the stories my grandmother used to tell me." Now Alma Flor Ada has over 200 books to her name, many drawn from her own childhood or from the folktales her family told her.
