Nancy Yi Fan was too young to know she was breaking every rule in the book when she e-mailed her first manuscript directly to the president and CEO of HarperCollins.
''I was being quite bold thinking I had nothing to lose,'' says Nancy, now an eighth-grader. 'I thought, `Maybe she will give me some advice.' ''
Instead the CEO, Jane Friedman, gave her a contract, passing Fan's allegorical story about warring avian factions and their quest for peace to her children's division, which published Swordbird (HarperCollins, $15.99, ages 8-12) this spring.
Now, Fan, 13, is seeing her name on The New York Times bestseller list.
Her story would be amazing for any teen but has another remarkable twist: Fan came to the United States from China just six years ago, knowing only a few words of English
. She says ''Miss Goodwin,'' her first English-as-a-Second-Language teacher, ``lit the spark of literature in my heart. Without her, I might not have written Swordbird.'' She started writing simply to express her ideas about ''the importance of peace and freedom,'' with a tale about a villainous hawk that forces enslaved birds to do his bidding.
me the really hard things. Just teach me the tricks,' and within a week I learned to twirl the sword and do some really magnificent moves,'' she says.
Nancy didn't tell her new classmates about her imminent debut as an author, hoping to be a ''normal student.'' They found out anyway. They read about her in the newspapers and ''they would jump out from behind the classroom door with books for me to sign,'' she says.
In April, she traveled to Beijing and Shanghai for the release of the Chinese edition of Swordbird , which she also translated. ''She wrote the novel and then she translated it as a way of keeping up with her native language,'' Yeh says.
This summer Nancy hopes to complete SwordQuest, a prequel, which Yeh already has under contract.
Check out the entire news article by Sue Corbett HERE
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