About Sue

SUE MACY is the author of close to two dozen books for children and young adults, many of which focus on sports and women’s history. Her book with illustrator Stacy Innerst, The Book Rescuer, won the 2020 Sydney Taylor Picture Book Award and her other nonfiction picture books, middle-grade biographies, and young adult social histories have been named to many Best Books lists and garnered many awards from state and national organizations. A graduate of Princeton University, Sue spent much of her early career at Scholastic Inc., supervising classroom magazines and serving as editor in chief of the best-selling Scholastic Children’s Dictionary. She lives in Englewood, New Jersey.

My Story

My former boss used to ask everyone she interviewed for a job the same question: “What were you like as a kid?” We worked in children’s publishing, and she thought people’s answers would give her an idea about how they would approach their jobs. She was right.

So now it’s my turn to answer the question. What was I like as a kid? Well, I was always competitive, which probably has a lot to do with why I like sports. I was a real tomboy. I never played with dolls and had limited patience for games in which you pretended to stay home and “keep house.”

I grew up in a New Jersey suburb, just 25 minutes from midtown Manhattan. My family used to go into New York (“the City”) often, to visit museums or watch baseball games or see shows. New York seemed like a magical place when I was young, and it still looms large in my life. Having the City at my back gives me a frame of reference when I look at the rest of the world.

My dad was a certified public accountant, which means he worked late several days a week every income tax season, from January till April 15. That was enough to convince me to choose a different career. Tax season even affected my parents’ wedding date. They got engaged in December, but had to wait till after April 15 to get married.

My mom taught business classes at a high school before she quit to become a homemaker. Later, she did computer work for my dad’s firm. She was involved in lots of charities and served as editor of the newsletter for her Hadassah women’s group. I got a thrill every time a box of printed newsletters arrived from the printer. That smell of ink on paper became a mark of achievement throughout my life in publishing and continues to be one today.

I have one brother who’s two and a half years younger than me. As kids, our relationship was a little bit like that of the Peanuts characters Lucy and Linus. I was definitely the bossy older sister, and I often lost patience with my sweet, younger brother. These days we get along a lot better.

I was a good student and particularly loved history and math. Chemistry was my downfall. I don’t know if it was the subject matter or the World Series. The year I took chemistry, the New York Mets played the Baltimore Orioles in the Series. Our class was scheduled for the last period of the day, so our teacher let us listen to the games, which were all played in the afternoon back then. Despite living so close to New York, I was a dedicated Orioles fan—the only one in the class. I never got over hearing my team lose the Series in five games while my classmates cheered. For the rest of the year, I got a sinking feeling in my stomach every time I went to chemistry.

When I got to college, I planned to study politics and become a lawyer, but I ended up majoring in history and American studies. It was the early 1970s, and “Women’s Liberation” was in full swing. My school, Princeton University, offered a student-initiated seminar in women’s studies, led by two young professors. One of them became my advisor, and we remain friends to this day. I did my senior thesis—a year-long research paper—on Alice Davis Menken, a Jewish woman who worked to reform delinquent Jewish girls in New York City in the early 1900s.

After college, I found a job at Scholastic Inc., helping out on a new American history textbook for high school students. I ended up working at the company a total of 16 years, leaving every so often for other jobs, but then coming back for something better. Scholastic is where I developed my writing skills and my editorial standards. It was a sort of finishing school for writers and editors, giving us hands-on experience that was much more authentic than what we would have learned in graduate school.

While I was editing Scholastic’s math magazines—DynaMath and MATH—I started spending my weekends researching and writing about women in sports. I was curious about the women who had played sports before it was popular to do so. I’d written a paper in college on three early female tennis players and I knew there had to be more women who had “dared to compete.”

At this point, I’ve spent close to 30 years writing books about women’s sports pioneers, looking at their accomplishments against the backdrop of the times in which they’ve lived. I’ve written about the impact of the bicycle on women’s lived in the 1890s, the new opportunities for female baseball players and sports reporters brought about by World War II, how women overcame early prejudices against them driving cars, and many other topics. But at the heart are the athletic women of character and conviction who helped change history by pursuing their dreams.

I admire the courage of those ornery women who didn’t take no for an answer. Their stories inspire me to try and be a little ornery myself.