“It helped me focus,” Muldrow says, “I couldn’t dwell on things. On September 11, 2001, the day terrorists attacked New York City and Washington, D.C., Muldrow was supposed to begin work on her four-book series on September 12, Bader called to make sure she was hard at work.
“It was probably the most challenging thing I’ve ever done,” Muldrow says about writing the Dish series. Bader successfully pitched the cooking series to her new employer with Muldrow as the sole author, and the co-author team became an author-editor team.
Muldrow and Bader planned to write the series together unfortunately, Golden Books declared bankruptcy and Bader left for Grosset & Dunlap. At that time, she and another Golden Books editor, Bonnie Bader, developed a proposal for a series about teenage girls who like to cook. In 1999, Muldrow moved back to Golden Books as an editor. “My first original book…was The Happy Book, a novelty book published by Scholastic’s Cartwheel Books, where I was working at the time…Being steeped in the industry was definitely a big factor in my writing taking off.” Muldrow’s big break came about ten years into her editing career. “I really learned the nuts and bolts of picture book writing, and I gained a lot of confidence.” Although, she often wondered if she would ever write a book from an original idea that did not involve licensed characters. “It was boot camp,” Muldrow says of the experience. She landed a job as a junior editor for Golden Books where she occasionally wrote licensed books involving Disney and Barbie characters. I started to think, well, maybe that is what I should be doing.” At least I had the presence of mind to realize I was doing that.
A frequent bookstore visitor, she recalls, “I was still going into the children’s section first. However, she continued to struggle with what she really wanted to do with her life. ”Īfter graduation, Muldrow decided not to pursue a career in magazine publishing, opting instead to perform on New York City’s avant-garde stage as a dancer and as an actor in several one woman monologues, a couple of which she wrote. As a dancer, she says, “I learned a lot about performing, choreography, and thinking. As a journalism student, she learned that every word in an article has to pack a punch. I wanted to be a photojournalist for National Geographic.”Īt Ohio University, Muldrow majored in magazine journalism and dance. By high school, though I had other aspirations. I wrote lots of poems and stories and even a novel in elementary school. Once when she was reading to me, I told her I wanted to write books when I grew up. “When I was very little,” Diane Muldrow says, “all my mother had to do to make me happy was read to me.
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