Fierce Joy: A Memoir is a medical mystery, a spiritual adventure, and a love story. Ellen Schecter had everything she ever wanted: a loving marriage, two great kids, and her dream career writing children's books and television programs. Then her life shattered when she was diagnosed with a painful, potentially fatal disease. Fierce Joy tells the story of how Schecter found a way to be sick without suffering and transformed the loss of her place in the world of work into a quest for her soul. Propelled by illness into a search for new meanings, she learned to listen to her body and find healing even though a cure was impossible. Never asking "Why me?" she instead asked, "What's next?" and forged a new life paradoxically filled with joy.
Ellen Schecter is a writer, producer, and educator. She's been widely published in print and on the web. She has written or collaborated on many multi-award-winning TV series for children and families, including "Reading Rainbow," and wrote the proposal and pilot for "The Magic School Bus."
She's published more than twenty children's books. "The Big Idea," her first novel, [Hyperion] won the Américas award. Her Family Haggadah was a Book of the Month selection.
She edited and helped write the beloved Bank Street Ready to Read series, and her articles about how to help children read appeared in Child, Parenting, and Sesame Street Parents.
