Frances Foster (editor)

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Frances Foster (born Frances Starbuck; June 3, 1931 – June 8, 2014) was a children's books editor. She was born in Oakland, California, where her father was a banker and her mother an artist. The family moved to Berkeley, and Frances grew up there. She earned a BA in English from Denison University in 1953. After a year in Rome, she returned to the U.S. to work in publishing. She asked editor Alice Dalgliesh for a job and was hired to cover a maternity leave. She later left Dalgliesh to become a freelance editor at Knopf, where she edited writers such as Leo Lionni and Roald Dahl. In 1995 she started Frances Foster Books at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, an imprint that published about a dozen new children's books each year by authors like Peter Sís and Louis Sachar. She retired in 2013 due to health issues. She married in 1956 and had two children. Foster died on June 8, 2014, at age 83, after suffering a stroke in 2012.