Roxane Beauclair Salonen ~ Children's Author

Inspiring children, one word at a time...

Home
History
Peace Garden
First Salmon
Blog and Column
Book Orders
Author Visits
Contact Me
Discovering Story

As the daughter of teachers, Roxane was exposed to books, and many of them, at an early age. Her father, an English teacher, not only read stories to her and her sister, Camille, but told them bedtime stories he'd fabricated himself. And her mother, an elementary teacher, always had a store of books for her daughters to browse.

 

This piqued Roxane's curiosity about the world around her. At age four, while her sister read to her, she finally insisted, "I want to read it now," and so she did.

 

As Roxane grew, and when complex emotions seemed hard to verbalize, she found a way to express them in written word. Recognizing this as a gift, she later pursued journalism as a career.


[Photo: Roxane and her sister, Camille, listening to a story read by their father, Robert, in 1970.]




A Bit of 'Her' Story

On Labor Day in 1968, Roxane Beauclair was born in Lovell, Wyoming. Shortly thereafter, the family of four moved to Poplar, Montana, on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation, which provided the main setting for her childhood.

 

In 1991, she graduated from college in Moorhead, Minnesota, and married her college sweetheart, Troy Salonen. They then moved to the state of Washington, where she worked for nearly five years as a newspaper reporter and editor. She was inspired by her very accomplished co-workers, including a mystery novelist, published poet, and several other extremely talented wordsmiths.

 

The birth of their first child made the Salonens yearn to be closer to their "homeland," so they relocated back to the Midwest, eventually making their new home in Fargo, North Dakota, where their subsequent four children were born.

 

In an effort to stay home with their young kids, Roxane took up freelance writing. During this time she also rediscovered children's books and began to revisit her longtime dream of authorship. She met author Jane Kurtz, one of her mentors, at a writing conference at the University of North Dakota in 1999. In the summer of 2002, she attended another conference in Chautauqua, New York, crossing paths with influential children's author and editor, James Cross Giblin, and Clay Winters, president of Boyds Mills Press.

 

After five years of pursuing publication of her stories, Roxane received a call from Kent Brown of Boyds Mills Press in October 2002 with a request to buy her manuscript, First Salmon, thereby launching her new career as an author.


[Photo: Roxane (center, pink dress) with her kindergarten class, September 1973]


(Next page)