About A.C. LeMieux

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Anne C. LeMieux believes that stories are parallel universes. 

Always an insatiable reader, LeMieux grew up in Fairfield, Connecticut, the second oldest of seven children—six of them brothers—a circumstance that later influenced her choice to write many young adult novels from a boy’s point of view.

In high school, her freshman English teacher brought literature vividly alive. Books such as To Kill a Mockingbird, Cress Delahanty, and The Return of the Native helped shape her sense of character and place—and her emerging identity as both reader and writer. During those years she also developed a lasting passion for research, literary and historical as well as scientific, particularly in the field of physics.

At Simmons College in Boston, she participated in a transformative interdisciplinary program called FEED (Freshman Experience in Educational Discovery), where she began keeping daily journals—a practice that sharpened her observation and her habit of collecting detail. Within that program she undertook a study of L. M. Montgomery’s works, which, as she later recalled, “validated my love of children’s literature as a legitimate avenue of study.”

Majoring in writing and communications and minoring in illustration, LeMieux spent a semester in England doing independent studies. Her first two published pieces—essays on the historicity of King Arthur and on life in a small village in Thomas Hardy’s Wessex—grew out of her time abroad, where she lived in a thatched-roof cottage with a donkey named Peppermint.

After college she pursued her love of music, studying jazz guitar under Sal Salvador at the University of Bridgeport, as well as classical and acoustic fingerstyle guitar, with an emphasis on French and Celtic folk traditions. She published occasional feature articles on her varied interests, including music and sailing, before marrying and raising a daughter and a son. Following their births, she returned to children’s writing in earnest.

Her debut novel, The TV Guidance Counselor, was recognized as an American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults. Her second, Do Angels Sing the Blues?—now newly back in print—earned a Parents’ Choice Silver Honors Award. She went on to publish nine more titles with major houses, spanning young adult, middle grade, and early reader fiction.

In 2000, when her son was diagnosed with Williams syndrome, LeMieux’s focus turned toward advocacy and supporting the WS community. For over a decade she served as manager and guitarist/bassist for his band of WS musicians, The Kandoo Band.

She lives near New Haven, Connecticut, with her husband, Tim Pocock, and their son, Brendan LeMieux.