TR Simon Books in Order

If you want the full Zora story: Zora and Me → The Cursed Ground → Zora and Me: The Summoner
If you want the strongest mystery hook: Zora and Me → The Cursed Ground
If you want a shorter, gentler read: Oskar and the Eight Blessings

T.R. Simon writes children's books that take young readers seriously. Her stories make room for wonder, humor, fear, history, and the hard questions kids ask when adults would rather look away.

She grew up living all over the world, an experience that fits the way her books move between places, cultures, and ways of seeing. She later earned an M.A. in cultural anthropology, a field built on listening closely to stories, rituals, and daily life. That background shows up all through her fiction.

Before publishing her own books, Simon worked in publishing. That life gave her a close look at how children's books are made, and it also led to one of the key creative partnerships of her career. She met Victoria Bond while they were both working in publishing, the two became close friends, and after years of talking about collaborating, they found the project that brought everything together, a novel imagining the childhood of Zora Neale Hurston.

That book was Zora and Me.

Co-written with Bond, Zora and Me introduces readers to a young Zora in Eatonville, Florida, the first incorporated Black town in the United States. The novel mixes friendship, folklore, and mystery, and it helped launch a series that keeps asking how stories can reveal the truth as much as they can hide it. The book won the Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe Award for New Talent and was nominated for an Edgar Award.

Simon returned to that world in The Cursed Ground, a deeper and darker middle grade novel that again follows Zora and her friend Carrie Brown. This time the mystery reaches back into slavery and the buried history beneath their town. Readers who like Simon's work often seem drawn to that blend, a page-turning plot on one hand, and real historical weight on the other.

The Zora story did not stop there. The trilogy closes with The Summoner, as Zora and Carrie move closer to the end of childhood and the wider world waiting beyond Eatonville.

She can also shift gears.

With her husband, Richard Simon, she wrote Oskar and the Eight Blessings, a picture book about a young Jewish refugee arriving in New York in 1938 and making his way through the city through small acts of kindness. It is much shorter than the Zora books, but the heart of it feels connected. Simon is interested in children in motion, children crossing into unfamiliar spaces, and children trying to make sense of danger without losing hope. The book won the National Jewish Book Award for Children's Literature.

Across her work, certain things show up again and again: the pull of community, the force of memory, the lives children build with friends, and the way storytelling can be both shield and lantern. Her settings matter too. Eatonville is not just a backdrop in the Zora books, and 1930s Manhattan is not just scenery in Oskar and the Eight Blessings. Place is part of the story's pressure and its warmth. Today Simon teaches a course on children's book publishing in the City University of New York Publishing Certificate Program. She lives in Westchester County, New York, with her husband, their daughter, and, by her own description, a very cuddly dog.