{This is an old photo but my favorite as it is with our beloved 'Max', aka Maximus Muppus, who was also my mascot for my small publishing company and who accompanied me to numerous readings.}

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Jan Lister Caldwell has published several works, including science-fiction adventure novels for the middle reader, children’s verse, and a collection of short stories for younger children. She has worked as a free-lance journalist, regularly writing feature articles for The Daily Gleaner, a province-wide paper based in Fredericton, NB. Her work included cover stories and photos for its three weekly magazines.

 

Before publishing her work, she worked with several schools in New Brunswick, Ontario, and Maine, and with local libraries. Her stories have been tested extensively. She published the series, testing the market and contacting reviewers. When the series was first published with advance copies for testing, the Canadian Book Review Annual gave the series a ‘Highly Recommended’ for each of the four reviewed - Time-Travel Runaway, Cousin Clash, The Young Lion and the Castle Curse, and Captain Blackheart’s Gold. Several other reviewers have had similar praise. The series was accepted by several Canadian educational distributors and a Canada-wide bookstore distributor. Unfortunately before she could get underway the printer doing the books suddenly went out of business leaving her to cancel the orders.

 

She was becoming ill during this time and had to put all but the actual writing and illustrating on hold until she recovered. She did have enough of a print-run of the fourth book, Captain Blackheart’s Gold, to offer it for review by the Dept. of Education of New Brunswick and it was on their resources list in NB  for over 10 years. Her book, The Science Fair Disaster, released in 2004, is listed with the Dept. of Education in Nova Scotia. Though SFD was done in a limited print run and marketed with limited funds, it was sold to schools across Canada. She hopes  to publish it in the near future through KDP to make it available everywhere.

 

She has been doing rewrites of the remaining novels in the series. Book Two, published previously under "Cousin Clash", is renamed, "Only Child" and was published July 31st, 2020 with a 2nd edition of it and Book One May 2021. The author also did the cover artwork. The Young Lion and the Castle Curse is the third adventure and Captain Blackheart's Gold will be the fourth offering in the adventure series. Both 2nd editions are published under the imprint Menagerie Publishing and future publications will also be under that label.

 

In May 2015 she was honored to have been named Executive Director and Summer Camp Coordinator of Dragonfly Centre for Autism, Inc. in St. Andrews, NB,  Canada, a Resource Center and Summer Camp for autistic children and young adults as well as those with other intellectual disabilities.

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July 2021 begins a new chapter with what may seem like retirement to some but is more like a chance to work harder on the books and art;)