In addition to her journalism career, Rinaldi also returned to writing fiction, at night when her children were in bed and in the mornings before work. Her column won first place in the New Jersey Press Association Awards in 19.

The following year, in 1970, Rinaldi pitched herself to the Trentonian newspaper, where she was hired to write two columns a week and quickly advanced to additionally writing soft news and features. “I earned seven dollars a week, but I was writing!” Rinaldi’s weekly column became syndicated and ran in a variety of newspapers around the state. “The editor gave it to me,” she recalled. “I wanted to be a novelist,” she told SATA, saying she wrote four “terrible” full-length novels before she approached her local weekly newspaper, the Somerset Messenger Gazette, and asked for a column. When her children started school, Rinaldi began to write in earnest. In 1960 Rinaldi married Ronald Rinaldi and moved to Branchburg, where they raised two children and where they remained through 61 years of married life.

Following high school, her father suggested that she enter the business world she told Something about the Author that she “kicked around the typing pool” and held jobs at the Visiting Nurse Association in New Brunswick and the American Can Company in Metuchen. Peter’s High School there in 1952.īy her early teenage years Rinaldi had begun writing poetry as a creative outlet. She grew up in New Brunswick, N.J., and graduated from St. Rinaldi was born Augin New York City, the fifth child of Michael Feis, a newspaper manager, and his wife Marcela Feis, who died just after Ann’s birth.

Award-winning author and journalist Ann Rinaldi, best known for her painstakingly researched YA historical fiction featuring female protagonists, died on July 1 in Branchburg, N.J.

Time enough for drums by ann rinaldi