About Meadow Rue Merrill

Award-winning author, Meadow Rue Merrill grew up on an Oregon farm where she roamed the fields, built hay forts, and rode her pony under the towering Douglas firs with her brother, Sunny. For entertainment, she invented stories about her classmates. Real life wasn’t nearly as interesting. Neither was school.

By fourth grade, Meadow was so far behind that her teachers forced her to sit in front of a machine that scrolled through paper to make her read faster. To the rescue came her clever mom, Lucy, who gave her The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. After a summer exploring the English countryside with a boy named Dickon, Meadow was hooked on books! Her favorites included The Black Stallion, Trixie Belden, and anything with a mystery.

The summer Meadow turned ten, her family moved to Maine. For a few years life was nearly normal. Then Lucy whisked Meadow and Sunny off to Darwin, Australia, to live at a mission. For one year Meadow shared her room with baseball-sized spiders and clouds of flying cockroaches. After high-tailing it back to Maine, she endured high school, attended one year of Bible school, and graduated with a degree in English literature from Gordon College. Two weeks later, she married her high school sweetheart and went to work as a reporter for Maine’s smallest daily newspaper, The Times Record, where she won first-place in feature writing from The Maine Press Association. Three years later, in another first, Meadow and her husband, Dana, welcomed their first child, and she began writing from home.

As a freelance journalist, Meadow corresponded for the Boston Globe, wrote parenting essays for the New York Times and contributed to Family Circle, the Boston Sunday Globe Magazine, the Portland Press Herald, and Down East magazine, where she eventually served as a contributing editor–all while raising six children. Her inspirational memoir, Redeeming Ruth: Everything Life Takes, Love Restores, won a 2017 Christopher Award and the 2018 Maine Literary Award for memoir. But Meadow’s true passion has always been writing for children. Her five-part Lantern Hill Farm children’s picture book series celebrates the holidays with activities that build children’s faith: The Christmas Cradle, The Backward Easter Egg Hunt, The Best Birthday, The Lantern Hill Light Parade, and The Thanksgiving Blessing.

In 2022 Meadow earned her M.Ed. in Literacy, Writing & Teaching Writing from the University of Maine at Orono, and is a certified Teacher-Consultant with the Maine Writing Project and the National Writing Project. She currently teaches 7th-10th grade English at an independent Maine school and enjoys sharing her love of books with students of all ages.

When not writing or teaching, Meadow can be found with her nose in a book in a little house in the big woods of Mid-coast Maine where she lives with her family, a rescue puppy named Fable, two adopted goats, and a flock of mischievous chickens. To stay in touch, sign up for Faith Notes, and have Meadow’s musings delivered directly to your inbox. You can also follow Meadow on Facebook and Twitter, where she loves to interact with other readers and writers.