Virginia Zimmerman grew up in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., though she was named for a great aunt, not for the state. When she was young, she enjoyed writing and talking to friends about books, so she decided to grow up into a person who could do those things all the time. She was an English major at Carleton College, and she went to graduate school in English at the University of Virginia.
When she finished school, she wasn’t done reading, writing and talking to friends about books, so she became an English professor at Bucknell University. This means—and she still pinches herself to make sure this is real—she gets to read and write and talk about books for a living. Most of the classes she teaches are about British literature of the nineteenth century or children’s fiction from the nineteenth century to today. She loves both.
Virginia also loves Catalonia, a beautiful region in the northeast corner of Spain. Her husband, Jordi, is part of a large and wonderful Catalonian family, and, for twenty years, Virginia and her family have made many visits to the city of Barcelona and lots of picturesque villages in the mountains, the countryside and the Mediterranean coast of northeast Spain. Jordi’s family has become her own, and Catalonia has become her second home.
Virginia’s first home is a two-hundred-year-old house in a small town on the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania, where she gets to read and write and talk about books with friends, family and students. She lives with her husband, three children and black dog Plato.