Peg Kehret

Who is Peg Kehret?

Peg Kehret is an American author, primarily writing for children between the ages of 8 and 15.

Kehret was born November 11, 1936 in La Crosse, Wisconsin. After a normal childhood, she developed a severe form of polio at age 12 to age 13 in 1949, along with 42,033 other cases, which paralyzed her and resulted in a seven-month hospital stay. Peg had each of the three types of polio: spinal, respiratory, and the most severe kind, bulbar.Her experience of the illness changed Kehret's life, as she describes in her memoir Small Steps: The Year I Got Polio, which won the 1998 Dorothy Canfield Fisher Children's Book Award. Most of Kehret's books are based on what happened in her life, like The Ghost's Grave, there used to be a small cemetery up the road where she lived as a kid with the same name on a grave stone as the one in the book.

In 1955, she married Carl Kehret; they moved to California and adopted two children, Bob and Anne. Before Kehret began writing children's books she wrote plays, radio commercials and magazine stories. In 1970, the Kehrets moved to Washington. Carl died on April 28, 2004