Michael J. Daley has enjoyed a lifelong love of science, spaceships, and science fiction. His novel, Shanghaied to the Moon (Putnam, 2006), was a co-winner of the 2008 Golden Duck Award for middle grade fiction given at WorldCon. Michael writes his stories on a solar-powered laptop in a 5-foot-by-5-foot square tower room. This keeps him well acquainted with the cramped conditions in spaceships and space stations! His most recent books for middle grade and young adult readers include Rat Trap (Holiday House, 2007), recently nominated to the 2010 Vermont Dorothy Canfield Fisher state award lists; Space Station Rat (Holiday House, 2005) — now out in paperback and nominated for the Oklahoma Sequoya Children's Book Award, the Rhode Island Children's Book Award, and the South Dakota Children's Book Award. The economic downturn has not been kind to his RAT series, leading to the rejection of the third book--after it was all written--there goes two years work! While pondering what to do about that, there have been two bright spots as he branches out in the children's field with an early reader, Pinch and Dash Make Soup, on the way next spring, and he's just gotten an offer for his first board book manuscript!

Michael also writes non-fiction: Amazing Sun Fun Activities (McGraw-Hill, 1998), Nuclear Power: Promise or Peril (Lerner, 1997), and At Home with the Sun (self-published, still in print since 1995). Michael keeps his hand in renewable energy education by conducting Pizza Box Solar Oven building workshops so kids can cook their own solar s'mores. He shares his writing skills with kids, along with his writer-wife, Jessie Haas, as a mentor in the Maple Leaf Writing Contest for 5^th- and 6^th-graders held in the Brattleboro, VT schools. He lives in a solar powered home in Westminster, VT that he and Jessie built themselves.