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It happened at night around fires in the backyard, it happened in bright sunshine on top of boulders in the Long Island Sound, and sometimes it even happened during spooky visits to the graveyard at the William Floyd Estate in Mastic Beach. Wherever and whenever, when Josephine Nobisso was a child, it was to her that cousins and friends looked to come up with appropriate stories and even with rhyming songs to the accompaniment of her guitar. All this was good practice for Josephine’s dream: that of becoming a children’s book author. Her first story for children appeared in a national magazine when she was 18. “Beginner’s luck,” she says, because even though she kept writing children’s stories, it was another ten years before her first children’s book was released. By that time she had published 3 pseudonymous novels for adults, but many of the manuscripts that Joi (a spelling one of her cousins created, and which is pronounced “Joey”) created in the meantime would later be published by Simon & Schuster, Scholastic/Orchard, Houghton Mifflin, Winslow House, Rizzoli International, Berkeley Jove (Putnam), Mondo, Pauline Books & Media, The Green Tiger Press, Unibooks Korea, and her own press, Gingerbread House. 

Josephine was born on February 9, 1953, in the Bronx, and was raised in the Arthur Avenue section called “Little Italy.”  She attended St. Martin of Tours School through fourth grade. When her family finally moved full time to their country house in Mastic Beach on Long Island, she spent two hours of every school day riding a bus to and from Riverhead, where she attended St. John the Evangelist school through eight grade, and then Mercy High School for two years.  It is to the education Josephine received in these schools that she feels she owes the debt of her writing career. As she so humorously conveys in IN ENGLISH, OF COURSE, she had trouble with the English language in school. “But by the time I was out of sixth grade,” Josephine says, “the nuns had kindly and patiently taught me everything I would need to know about grammar.”  Now a wife and a mother who homeschooled her daughter, Gingerbread House’s Art Director Maria Nicotra, Ms. Nobisso and her family live on the East End of Long Island, in the little hamlet of Quiogue.