Jennifer Armstrong

The Fire-Us Trilogy (Book 1: The Kindling, Book 2: Keepers of the Flame, and Book 3: The Kiln) is a series of post-apocalyptic young adult fiction by Jennifer Armstrong and Nancy Butcher. The series begins in 2007, five years after a plague of unknown origin has killed the vast majority of the human population. The plot concerns the family, a group of orphan children living in the small fictional town of Lazarus, Florida. The older children, now approaching adolescence, attempt to emulate the behavior of the "first families" to which they belonged before the plague. Armstrong and Butcher depict the children as traumatized and ill-equipped to handle the world around them, the youngest being barely more than toddlers at the time of the "Fire-Us," the children's name for the contagion. Teacher takes on the responsibility of educating the younger children, Baby, Doll, Teddy Bear (her brother) and Action Figure (Hunter's brother). Teacher compulsively collects information concerning the Fire-Us and the collapsed civilization in The Book, a scrapbook which she adds to in a trancelike state. In reality, The Book seems to be a meaningless collection of advertisements, half-remembered news segments, and bits of instruction manuals. Fourteen-year-old Mommy acts as a maternal figure to the younger children, attempting to feed them a nutritious diet. She refuses to leave the house, and suffers from extreme agoraphobia. Both Mommy and Teacher are frequently frustrated by Action Figure, who frequently skips lessons and meals to go out scavenging with Hunter, an older boy- also fourteen- who searches Lazarus for rapidly dwindling food.

Jennifer Mary Armstrong (born May 19, 1961) is an American children's writer known for both fiction and non-fiction. She was born in Waltham, Massachusetts, grew up outside of New York City, and now lives in Saratoga Springs, New York. She was formerly married to the author James Howard Kunstler.

This non-fiction narrative details the 1914-1916 expedition to Antarctica led by Sir Ernest Shackleton on the Endurance. His vessel was shipwrecked and frozen on ice for 10 months until pressure finally crushed it. The crew camped on the ice for five months before crossing the open in two open boats to South Georgia Island. The book contains more than 40 vintage photographs taken during the expedition. For her writing and research Armstrong was selected as an Orbis Pictus Award winner.

Intended for middle-school-aged readers, Armstrong wrote this series of five books about an Irish family living in Swampoodle, Washington, D.C. during the Civil War. The family- composed of a drunken father, his son- a bricklayer during the construction of the Capitol building- and his daughter Mairhe, who works at the Shinny, the local pub. There, Mairhe hears patrons discussing the war; though she believes the Irish should not take sides, others see it as "a means to free slaves who will then push them even further down the economic scale in the competitive job market." Her brother Mike joins the Union army, causing her to contemplate the reasoning of Irish loyalty to either side of the war. While working she meets Walt Whitman, who acts as a symbolic unifier to her conflicting feelings by showing her how to open up to new people. In the afterword to Becoming Mary Mehan, Armstrong states that after finishing The Dreams of Mairhe Mehan, she took a train to northern Canada with only one book: a collection of essays about the pioneering naturalists of North America. With that, she received the inspiration for the plot of Mary Mehan Awake. Although historically "well-researched," in one book Armstrong misplaced the building of the Capitol in the 1860s despite its completion by 1830. However, she accurately portrays Whitman in Brooklyn on the day after Lincoln's funeral. The Dreams of Mairhe Mehan was listed on the 1998 Young Adult Choices list as a result of being voted in the top 30 by students in American schools grades 7-12.