About the Authors
Grant Faulkner is the executive director of National Novel Writing Month (a.k.a. NaNoWriMo) and the cofounder of 100 Word Story. His stories have appeared in dozens of literary magazines, including Tin House, Southwest Review, and Five Points. His essays on creativity have been published in the New York Times, Poets & Writers Magazine, Writer’s Digest, and The Writer. He recently published a collection of one hundred 100-word stories, Fissures.
Rebecca Stern has experienced NaNoWriMo from every angle: she had her fifth- and sixth-grade students participate in the Young Writers Program when she was a teacher, did a victory dance in the 50K winner’s circle in 2014, served on the Associate Board, was their Director of Programs, and is now their Young Writers Program and Development Consultant. She lives in San Francisco.
About the Narrators
Jennifer Niven’s first book, The Ice Master, was named one of the top ten nonfiction books of the year in 2000 by Entertainment Weekly. A Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writer, she has ten different publishers in ten separate countries, and The Ice Master has been translated into eight languages. Jennifer and her work have appeared in Newsweek, Entertainment Weekly, Talk, Glamour, the New Yorker, Outside, the New York Times Book Review, the London Daily Mail, the London Times, and Writer’s Digest, among others. Dateline NBC, the Discovery Channel, and the History Channel have featured The Ice Master in hour-long documentaries, and it has been the subject of numerous German, Canadian, and British television programs.
Daniel José Older is the New York Times bestselling author of several series, including the young-adult series The Shadowshaper Cypher, the Bone Street Rumba urban fantasy series, and the middle-grade historical fantasy Dactyl Hill Squad. He won the International Latino Book Award and has been nominated for the Kirkus Prize, the Mythopoeic Award, the Locus Award, the Andre Norton Award, and the World Fantasy Award. Shadowshaper was named one of Esquire’s “80 Books Every Person Should Read.”
Ron Butler is a Los Angeles–based actor, Earphones Award–winning audiobook narrator, and voice artist with over a hundred film and television credits. Most kids will recognize him from the three seasons he spent on Nickelodeon’s True Jackson, VP. He works regularly as a commercial and animation voice-over artist and has voiced a wide variety of audiobooks. He is a member of the Atlantic Theater Company and an Independent Filmmaker Project Award winner for his work in the HBO film Everyday People.
Jason Reynolds is a #1 New York Times bestselling author, a Newbery Award Honoree, a Printz Award Honoree, a two-time National Book Award finalist, a Kirkus Award winner, a Carnegie Medal winner, a two-time Walter Dean Myers Award winner, an NAACP Image Award Winner, and the recipient of multiple Coretta Scott King honors. He is also the 2020–2021 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. His many books include Long Way Down, which received a Newbery Honor, a Printz Honor, and a Coretta Scott King Honor. You can find his ramblings at JasonWritesBooks.com.
Marissa Meyer is the author of the Lunar Chronicles series, of which Scarlet was a New York Times bestseller. She attended Pacific Lutheran University, where she earned her BS in creative writing.
Danielle Paige is
a graduate of Columbia University and currently lives in New York City. Before
turning to young adult literature, she worked in the television industry, where
she received a Writers Guild of America Award and was nominated for several Daytime
Emmys. Dorothy Must Die was her first novel.
Neil Hellegers grew up in New Jersey and attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a BA in theater arts and a minor in psychology before getting an MFA in acting from the Trinity Rep Conservatory in Providence, Rhode Island. He moved to New York City in 2003 and, since then, has made a career of theatrical performance, percussion, theater education, and audiobook narration. He currently lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son.