Author
Leigh Bardugo is the author of the New York Times best seller, Shadow and Bone. She was born in Jerusalem, grew up in Los Angeles, and graduated from Yale University. These days, she lives in Hollywood where she creates glamour and ghouls in her other life as makeup artist L.B. Benson. The second book in the Grisha Trilogy, Siege and Storm, will be published in June 2013. To learn more, please drop by Leigh’s web site or follow her antics on twitter.
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Author
Erin has spent most of her life telling stories. It is rumored that her first words were not “Mama” or “Dada,” but “Once upon a time.” In middle school, when kids were going off to sleep-away camp for the summer, Erin was attending writing camp and penning short stories. When not writing, Erin can often be found far away from the computer (hiking or camping), or geeking out over letterpressed stationery, good typography, and everything Harry Potter. She drinks a lot of coffee, buys far too many books, and is not terribly skilled at writing about herself in the third person. Erin lives in New Hampshire with her husband, better known as The Engineer.
You can stalk her online via twitter and her blog, and her debut YA novel, Taken, will be published by HarperTeen (April 16, 2013).
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Author, School & Library Marketer
Alex was born and raised in Arizona by an artsy mother and a Star Wars-collecting father. She traded her desert for colonial bonnets to study History and English at the College of William & Mary in Virginia. After graduating, she relocated to New York City, where she now works in children’s publishing and lives in a charming apartment overflowing with books. Her two novels, Brightly Woven and The Darkest Minds, are both available now. You can visit her online at her website, Twitter, or Tumblr.
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Author
Susan is a reader, writer, lover of animals, and eater of cookies. She used to be a marine biologist, but now she writes novels–and not novels about fish, but novels about kick-butt heroines and swoon-worthy rogues. She lives in the Midwestern US with her French husband and Irish setter, and you can learn more about her crazy thoughts and crippling cookie-addiction on her blog, twitter, or facebook. Her debut, Something Strange and Deadly, is now available from HarperTeen!
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Publishing Sales Representative
Vanessa Di Gregorio works in publishing as an account manager/sales rep at Ampersand, a book and gift sales agency. A former literary agency intern, Vanessa can be found driving around to bookstores when she isn’t reading, playing video games, watching T.V., or writing. She also may or may not be working on a YA fantasy. A social media addict, carbivore, Instagram junkie, board game collector, and supporter of the serial comma, Vanessa leads a wonderfully geeky life in Toronto with her husband. You can find Vanessa over at Something Geeky, Goodreads, Twitter, or writing for Paper Droids.
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Author
Julie Eshbaugh used to have trouble staying in one spot. Having lived in places as varied as Utah, France, and New York City, Julie eventually returned home to the Philadelphia area where she now lives with her husband, son, cat and dog. Early on, Julie focused her artistic energies on filmmaking and online video. She made two short films and then spent several years producing an online video series for teens which received several honors from the Webbie Awards. Creating videos for teens led to writing novels for teens, and Julie has never looked back. You can find add Julie on Goodreads and follow her on Twitter.
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Editorial Assistant
S. Jae-Jones (called JJ) is an editorial assistant at St. Martin’s Press, an adrenaline junkie, a skydiving enthusiast, a lover of baby harp seals, The Libertines, Lady Gaga, and anything gothic, creepy, weird, and whimsical. When not editing books or jumping out of perfectly good airplanes, JJ can be found training for the NYC marathon (ha!), attempting to write a book, and obsessing over Doctor Who and Avatar: The Last Airbender. Other places to find JJ include Twitter, Tumblr, and her blog.
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Author
Amie Kaufman had the good fortune to be raised just one block from her local library, and took full advantage of that fact growing up. She and her sister spent their childhood summers re-creating their favorite books by camping in the back yard, mapping their neighborhood, climbing trees, stepping through magical doors and sailing the local seas. Raised in Australia and Ireland, she has kissed the Blarney stone six times, thoroughly cementing her gift of the gab. She now lives in Melbourne, Australia with her husband Brendan and her rescue dog, Jack. She still sails, and though she climbs fewer trees, she remains partial to investigating the occasional magical door. You can find her on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads or on her blog. Her debut novel, These Broken Stars (co-authored with Meagan Spooner) will be out from Disney-Hyperion in 2013.
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Author
Biljana Likic (Bil-yana Lik-itch) was born in Belgrade, Ex-Yugoslavia, but has lived in Toronto, Canada since she was only a year old. Her dream as a kid was to be an actor, but as time passed this dream morphed into being a writer, since in writing she wasn’t confined to simply one character. It was during high school that she decided to dabble in writing a novel, and it has since turned into the finished manuscript she is revising today.
She’s also passionate about history and the personalities that occupy it. She’s constantly drawing inspiration from the past and setting these ideas in today’s world, discovering that really, people don’t intrinsically change as drastically as the snooty tomes of history would have us believe. Right now, she’s in her third year at the University of Toronto with a double major of English and Medieval Studies.
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Assistant Editor
Jordan Hamessley London is an assistant editor at Grosset and Dunlap, an imprint of Penguin Young Readers where she edits Adam-Troy Castro’s middle grade horror series Gustav Gloom, Literally Disturbed (an upcoming collection of scary stories from Ben H. Winters), A.J. Stern’s Frankly, Frannie series and more. She is on the editorial team for Ann Hood’s middle grade historical time-travel series The Treasure Chest. When not editing, Jordan can be found on twitter talking about books, scary movies, and musical theater.
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Author
Marie Lu is the New York Times bestselling author of Legend and Prodigy, now out from Putnam Children’s [Penguin Group]. Prior to writing full-time, she was an art director at a video game company, where she worked on Facebook games. She graduated from the University of Southern California in 2006 and lives in Los Angeles, where she spends her time lost on the freeways.
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Author
Sarah J. Maas was born and raised in New York City, but after graduating from Hamilton College in 2008, she moved to Southern California. She’s always been just a *tad* obsessed with fairy-tales and folklore, though she’d MUCH rather be the one slaying the dragon (instead of the damsel in distress). When she was sixteen, she discovered FictionPress.com, and shared a (very rough) draft of Throne of Glass, a YA epic fantasy retelling of Cinderella. For the six years Throne of Glass was on FictionPress (at the time called Queen of Glass), it developed a massive fanbase–which later gave her the confidence to attempt getting it published.
Many rewrites and revisions later, Throne of Glass is less a Cinderella retelling and more of an original epic fantasy, and it will be published by Bloomsbury Children’s in Fall 2012. Over the years, she’s written several other novels (most of them fairy-tale retellings), and when she’s not busy writing, she can be found geeking out over things like Han Solo, gaudy nail polish, and ballet. You can visit her website here, add her on Facebook and Goodreads, and follow her on Twitter.
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Author
Jodi Meadows lives and writes in the Shenandoah Valley, Virginia, with her husband, a Kippy*, and an alarming number of ferrets. She is a confessed book addict, and has wanted to be a writer ever since she decided against becoming an astronaut. Her debut novel, Incarnate, and its sequel, Asunder, are now available from Katherine Tegen Books!
*A Kippy is a cat..
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Canadian Educational Book Wholesaler
Rachel has always been a booklover, and is never long without a book in her hand. From a young age, she had many career ambitions, including Doctor, Lawyer, Veterinarian and Magician (all at once) but ended up doing none of those, and making a career in the book industry. Rachel got her first official job in a bookstore twelve years ago in the children’s section of Indigo (a Canadian bookstore chain) and has never looked back. For the last six and a half years she has been the children’s and young adult book selector at a Canadian National Book wholesaler, and loves having the excuse to keep reading children’s books!
Rachel also maintains a personal blog where she reviews what she’s been reading (http://readingtimbits.blogspot.com) and can be found hanging around Twitter as @rachelnseigel.
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Literary Agent
Joanna is a literary agent who represents all brands of fiction, from picture books to adult. She has an affinity for stories that have a darker, grittier element to them, whether they be horror, drama or comedy. Her recent publications include The Shadow Reader by Sandy Williams (Ace), Divergent by Veronica Roth (Katherine Tegen Books), Shut Out by Kody Keplinger (Poppy), and Torn by Erica O’Rourke (KTeen). When Joanna is not reading (which is almost never), she can be found either cooking, playing video games, or hanging out with her husband and their chihuahua PeeWee on Long Island.
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Author
Kat Zhang is an avid traveler, and after a childhood spent living in one book after another, she now builds stories for other people to visit. An English major at Vanderbilt University, she spends her free time performing Spoken Word poetry, raiding local bookstores, and plotting where to travel next. What’s Left of Me–about a girl with two souls–is her first novel and was released by HarperCollins on 9/18/2012. The sequel, Once We Were, comes out 9/17/2013. She is represented by Emmanuelle Morgen of Stonesong. You can read about her travels, literary and otherwise, on her website or check her out on Twitter.
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