Life and career

Sloan was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan and spent her childhood living in California, the Netherlands, Istanbul, Turkey, Washington D.C. and Eugene, Oregon. She received her undergraduate degree from Wellesley College in Massachusetts, and after working briefly at Grey Advertising in New York City, moved to Los Angeles where she sold her first screenplay at the age of 24.

Her film credits include writing Made in America (1993), and writing and producing Angels in the Outfield (1994). She was the first woman to direct a live action film for Disney when she both wrote and directed the soccer film The Big Green (1995). Sloan followed this up when she wrote and directed the independent film The Secret Life of Girls, which premiered at the Seattle Film Festival.

Sloan was the screenwriter on Steve Irwin's feature film for MGM The Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course (2002). She was the writer and director of the film Heidi 4 Paws (2008), which is a retelling of the children's classic story of Heidi, written by Johanna Spyri in 1880, but with live action dogs in all of the parts. The film first aired on Public Television sponsored by Chicago Public Television station WTTW. She was the screenwriter of the 2014 Hallmark Hall of Fame Christmas movie: One Christmas Eve.

Sloan's debut novel, I'll Be There, was published by Little, Brown and Company in spring of 2011. Her books are currently in print in nineteen languages. Her second novel, Counting By 7s, was published by Dial in August 2013. It was Amazon's best book of the year for middle graders, and spent seven months on the New York Times Bestseller list. A sequel to I'll Be There, titled Just Call My Name, was published on August 5, 2014. Both I'll Be There and the follow up novel have been optioned by ABC Family for a one-hour television series.

Counting By 7s was nominated for a Dorothy Canfield Fisher Book Award in 2014, and is a nominee for the Global Read Aloud Award. It was honored in Italy with the Andersen Prize in Genoa in May 2015 for best novel for children ages 12+. It is currently on 41 state reading lists in the United States, and won best book for young readers in North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Michigan.

Sloan's latest novel Appleblossom the Possum, was published in August 2015 by Dial (Penguin Random House). It was an Amazon Best Book of the Month, and an Indie Next selection for the fall of 2015. The book features illustrations by her husband, Gary A. Rosen, who is also a film and television writer.

[ Source: Wikipedia ]