Nancy Farmer (born July 1941) is an American author of children's and young-adult books and science fiction. She has written three Newbery Honor Books and she won the U.S. National Book Award for Young People's Literature for The House of the Scorpion, published by Atheneum Books for Young Readers in 2002.
Farmer was born in Phoenix, Arizona. She earned her B.A. at Reed College (1963) and later studied chemistry and entomology at the University of California, Berkeley. She enlisted in the Peace Corps (1963–1965), and subsequently worked in Mozambique and Rhodesia (modern Zimbabwe), where she studied biological methods of controlling the tsetse fly between 1975–1978. She met her future husband, Harold Farmer, at the University of Rhodesia (now the University of Zimbabwe). After a week-long courtship, the two were married. Farmer currently lives in the Chiricahua Mountains in Arizona with her husband; they have one son, Daniel.
Nancy Farmer (born September 11, 1956) was the 43rd State Treasurer of Missouri, serving from 2001 to 2005.
Farmer was raised in Jacksonville, Illinois and graduated from Illinois College there in 1979. From 1993-97, she served in the Missouri House of Representatives. During her tenure in the state legislature, she served as chairwoman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee.
Farmer served as Assistant Treasurer under then-State Treasurer Bob Holden since 1997, then was elected State Treasurer of Missouri herself in November 2000. She was the first woman to hold both posts.
She was the unsuccessful Democratic candidate in the 2004 United States Senate election in Missouri, running against incumbent Republican Kit Bond.