V.T. Bidania was born in Laos and grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota, where her family resettled as Hmong refugees.​ 

 

She spent her childhood fascinated by magical Hmong folktales and her family's stories about Laos and the refugee camps of Thailand where they lived before coming to the United States.

As her love for stories grew, she read every book she could get

her hands on and dreamed up her own stories.

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After studying journalism at St. Catherine University, she moved to New York City to attend NYU's Summer Publishing Institute and received her MFA in creative writing from the New School.

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She worked in children's book publishing for many years before returning to Minnesota. She then entered the field of education and worked in K-5 ELL classes, preschool classrooms, and her favorite job of all, a school media center! It was during this time that she met many of the fantastic Hmong students who inspired the characters in her chapter book, Astrid and Apollo.

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She is a McKnight Writing Fellow and the author of the ASTRID AND APOLLO and EXTRAORDINARY ELIANA series and the middle grade novel in verse, A YEAR WITHOUT HOME, a fictionalized memoir about her family's escape from Laos after the Vietnam War. ​​​​

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V.T. Bidania is represented by Laurel Symonds at KT Literary.