Marie Cheine

Marie was born in the Bronx, New York, but was raised in Queens and on Long Island. When she was three her mother took her to the Queens Library at Bellerose for Library School. There she sat quietly with all the other young kids and listened to the librarian read stories aloud. That and the bedtime stories her parents read to her every night until she was old enough to read herself, began her life-long love of storytelling and writing.

Fast forward to two years of community college where she amassed credits in English and Music, dropped out, enrolled in business school, became a medical assistant, and moved to Florida. She initially worked at the University of South Florida in the Cardiology Department and for the last twenty five years she has been the patient coordinator for the Tampa Bay Adult Congenital Heart Clinic. During this time, she graduated from Thomas Edison College where she majored in English and later earned a Master’s Degree in Interdisciplinary Studies (Literature and Writing) from Western New Mexico University. In between, she got married, had a son, adopted numerous cats and two dogs and became a grandmother.

Meanwhile, her niece was born with a rare set of birth defects causing malformations in many body systems known as VATER or VACTERYL Association. This included a medical condition requiring emergency colostomy immediately after birth, one completely non-functioning kidney and one that soon after required dialysis and eventual kidney transplant, a tethered spine and scoliosis requiring five surgeries and a heart condition called Wolfe Parkinson White.

Following a particularly long admission when her niece was hospitalized for almost an entire year, Marie formulated the idea of creating a series of books dedicated to children with serious and life-threatening illnesses. White Bear’s Big Adventure is the first in the series. It is the story if a little girl who enters the hospital for a life-changing kidney transplant the adventure that her very best friend, White Bear, finds himself in the middle of.

The books in this series will be informative, easy to relate to, entertaining, and will be respectful of the limited concentration time that seriously ill children can devote to reading. They will focus around a diverse set of characters most of whom face the difficulties of chronic illness, but the illness will not be main focus of the stories.

If you want to learn more about how the White Bear Project started, you can go to http://www.harmonicfactory.com/bookshelf/ to read more.

She hopes the White Bear Series will be a part of the reason children love to read; particularly young readers, who are chronically ill children, their siblings, family and friends.