About

Samantha Cruz, born January 23, 1991, grew up in Bunnell, Florida on the family farm where her father, Jerry, and mother, Maria, still reside today. She is the third born of four girls, who still live in and around the area.

As children growing up on the family farm, a lack of neighbors led to endless imaginative adventures amongst the siblings, from building forts in the woods, to creating “cousins’ plays” for the extended family to enjoy.

Samantha’s first book (about an alien she found behind a dumpster) was published through a student publishing project in the second grade. Although her spark for writing didn’t reveal itself until her early 20s, her imagination, creative nature, and silly tendencies never dwindled.

Through various life circumstances, including an inability to settle on a field of study, Samantha was posed with many challenges when pursuing her undergraduate degree. She changed fields of study many times, attempting to land in the most practical of courses, until she finally let her love of the natural environment guide her decision. Samantha graduated from the University of Florida with a B.S. in Environmental Management and Agriculture in the spring of 2014. It was in that same year that she began to wake up in the middle of the night with stories swirling around in her head.

From her mid to late twenties, Samantha relocated a number of times, often to small, outlying towns around the country. With no career prospects in her field of study, she became an elementary school teacher, first landing an assignment in the second grade at Desert Star Elementary School in southern New Mexico. She quickly fell in love with the profession and knew her life forevermore would be centered around children.

Through the creative writing assignments she would give to her second graders, she quickly learned about the lack of imaginative skills that many of her students possessed. “I couldn’t believe that the imagination of some of my students was almost completely nonexistent. Now, I often wonder if this creative barrier is due to too much technology at too early an age. Children need to have opportunities to feel bored- they need opportunities to think. Perhaps constant access to technology takes away the need for creativity because, essentially, all of the imagination is being done for [the children],” she later said. As a result of this realization, and an immense love for her students, the number of imaginative works she produced began to proliferate.

For the next 6 years she continued her career as an educator, with her primary assignments in middle school science and elementary language arts. The closer she became with early school aged children, learning of their aspirations, their own perceived roadblocks to success, as well as their social tendencies, the more inspiration she garnered for her books. During this time, she learned not only about the interests of her students, but also gained first hand knowledge of the pervasive fixed mindset that plagues much of our youth today.

Her first book, Fin the Fern (2018), follows the early growth of a fern who, with the help of a benevolent dove, is encouraged through her first moments in a new and vibrant world. Fin the Fern carries such themes as kindness, mentorship, and love while other themes throughout her works include exploration and imagination. Perhaps born out of her experiences as a teacher and her own scientific interests, her children’s stories often fall on the spectrum between literature and science, with the most recent series, Addison Rue and the Big Dreaming Book, taking young readers on an adventure of discovery in the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math.

In 2020, after many pivotal life changes, Samantha returned to her hometown. In 2021, she concluded her schoolhouse teaching career in the very elementary school she attended as a child, and amongst educators that she, herself, called teacher all those years before. “To end my traditional teaching career at my own elementary school is such a special experience that I will treasure forever. However, my teaching career isn’t truly over, it just looks a little different now. Students will always be a part of my life because a community tie like this, once experienced, can never be broken,” she said recently regarding the career shift.

Samantha now lives on Anastasia Island with her husband, Chris, and with his unwavering support, pursues writing full-time. Her next children’s book, Addison Rue, Chef, is set for release in summer, 2022. 

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