Angelica Shirley Carpenter writes biographies for young people and older readers, too. Her subjects are authors—Frances Hodgson Burnett, L. Frank Baum, Robert Louis Stevenson, Lewis Carroll, and Matilda Joslyn Gage.

Angelica speaks for teachers, librarians, writers, book clubs, students, bookstore groups, and other audiences. Her photographs appear in her books and in her illustrated talks.

Angelica lives with her husband in Fresno, California. A self-proclaimed Oz nut, she is a past president of the International Wizard of Oz Club. In her former life she was a librarian, the founding curator of the Arne Nixon Center for the Study of Children's Literature at California State University, Fresno. She likes to read, travel, shop, cook, watch movies, and listen to rock and roll (not all at the same time).

Arm in Arm: The Grimké Sisters' Fight for Abolition and Women's Rights

Sisters Sarah and Angelina Grimké were born around 1800 to a wealthy family in Charleston, South Carolina. Their father made his money through the unpaid labor of three hundred men, women, and children enslaved on his plantations and in his homes. Of eleven Grimké children, only Sarah and Angelina took against slavery. As young adults, they moved to Philadelphia and became Quakers. Then they became abolitionists, and next they became some of the first women ever to speak in public in the United States. When critics said that women had no right to speak in public, or to offer opinions about slavery or politics, Sarah and Angelina took up the cause of women’s rights.
After Angelina married abolitionist Theodore Weld, the sisters retired from speaking and began writing and teaching, still working to achieve equal rights for all. After the Civil War they learned that their brother Henry had fathered three sons with his enslaved mistress. They welcomed these mixed-race young men into their close family circle. The nephews and a great-niece continued the sisters’ work, in new ways, into the twentieth century.

Arm in Arm will be published in September 2025.

Join Angelica at her most recent podcast interview at The Well-Tended Life with Keri Wilt, Great-Great-Granddaughter to Frances Hodgson Burnett (author of The Secret Garden): Episode 69: The Secret Garden Keys to Unlocking Your Imagination with Biographer and Author Angelica Carpenter

Watch various video recordings and interviews