Jennifer Travis Maruno began her publishing career with award winning educational materials for The Peel District School Board and the Ontario Ministry of Education. She is one of the authors of Explorations a mathematics program for Addison-Wesley of Canada and worked with TVO in developing teaching materials for the television show Mathica’s Mathshop. For her contributions to educational writing, she received the Federation of Women Teachers Writing Award, the National Council of Teachers Award of Excellence and The Award of Merit from the National School Public Relations Association. She holds a Masters of Education, Principal’s and Primary Specialists certification and is a graduate of the Institute of Children’s Literature and the Humber School of Writers summer program. Her short stories for children have appeared in a variety of children’s magazines in Great Britain, United States and Canada.

Educator, researcher and author, Jennifer Maruno knows stories provide much more than entertainment. From the pages of Canadian history, she creates novels empathetic to those who have experienced the darker side of our past.  Maruno’s understanding of the importance of cultural identity has brought The Cherry Blossom series, based on the Japanese Internment , Warbird  a novel of  Jesuit life among the Huron people,  Kid Soldier the story of an underage soldier during WW2 and Totem a boy seeking identity from the confines of a residential school.

A member of CANSCAIP and THE WRITERS UNION OF CANADA , her novels have won nominations for the Hackmatack , Young Readers of Canada, and Rocky Mountain Book Awards.