About Sarah

The Quick and Dirty:

I’m a 25 year-old YA fantasy author living in the desert in Southern California. My debut novel, Throne of Glass, was published by Bloomsbury Children’s in August, 2012. (Book Two – Crown of Midnight - will release sometime in Fall 2013.)

I was born/raised in Manhattan, but traded freezing winters and sweltering summers for No Winter Ever Weather when I followed my then-boyfriend (now husband!) out to California in 2008. I graduated Magna Cum Laude from Hamilton College with a degree in Creative Writing, and a minor in Religious Studies. I’m represented by Tamar Rydzinski of the Laura Dail Literary Agency.

The Long & Even Dirtier:

I was raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where I grew up roving the halls of the Natural History Museum, wandering through the Temple of Dendur the Met, and spending summer evenings at the Metropolitan Opera House, watching the American Ballet Theatre perform. When my parents weren’t ushering me from one New York City delight to the next, they were reading me fairy-tales and folklore from around the world. From “Cinderella” to “Vasilisa The Brave,” from “East Of the Sun, West of the Moon” to “The Terrible Nung Gwama,” my parents left no legend untold. Honestly, it’s not all that surprising that I now make my living writing mostly fairy-tale retellings about kick-butt heroines.

I’ve been a “teller of tall tales” since I can remember (I think my parents preferred that term to “extravagant and unnervingly good liar”), and began writing my first (serious) novel at sixteen. It started out as this re-imagining of “Cinderella” (basically: what if Cinderella was an assassin, and went to the ball not to dance with the prince, but to kill him?) and quickly became Throne of Glass, a sprawling epic fantasy series with very few Cinderella elements.

In April 2002, I began posting the first chapters of the very rough draft (then called Queen of Glass) on FictionPress.com, a wonderful website for aspiring authors. After getting some super-positive responses, I posted some more. Six years later, Throne of Glass had become the most-reviewed story on FictionPress, garnering thousands of readers from around the world. Their enthusiasm and dedication led me to try my hand at getting Throne of Glass published, and in late 2008, I left FictionPress to follow my dreams of being a published author.

Many extensive rewrites and revisions later, I sold Throne of Glass to Bloomsbury Children’s in early 2010, and it released on August 7th, 2012.

Publishing takes a while. So during my hunt to get an agent, then the quest to find a publisher, then the long journey from sold manuscript to published/real novel, I wrote a few other books:

A Faraway  Land, an adult fantasy that re-examines the legends of fairy godmothers; Hades, a YA fantasy that re-imagines Greek mythology; and A Court of Thorns and Roses, a YA trilogy that blends together and retells the tales of “Beauty and the Beast” “East of the Sun, West of The Moon,” and “Tam-Lin.”

My most recent project is Nautilus, a middle-grade action-adventure fantasy I coauthored with my darling friend, Susan Dennard, that re-works the story of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. There have also been a few other books here and there, but those will never see the light of day.

When I’m not writing, I can usually be found watching an ungodly amount of TV shows, following ballet the way people follow sports, and guzzling down coffee and carbs. Though I’m now a full-time writer, I still get bossed around by my dachshund-terrier-pug-black lab mix, Annabel Lee (who is sitting in my lap, demanding that I pay attention to her as I write this). My husband and I met the first day of my freshman year of college (he was a junior…and my RA), we got married in May 2010, and we’ve been living happily ever after since (…but I swear we’re not one of those cutesy couples).

I’m also prone to gushing about things like Hayao Miyazaki films, make up and nail polish, Ancient Aliens theories, fantastic books (some of them are listed on the sidebar of my blog), Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Indiana Jones, random anime, Disney (My favorite Disney film? The Little Mermaid. Or Sleeping Beauty. Or Beauty and the Beast. Tough call.), and illustrations by Trina Schart Hyman.

And if you want to know even MORE about me, you can follow me on Twitter, on Pinterest, or on Facebook. I’m also a contributor to Pub(lishing) Crawl, a blog geared toward writing, books, and the ins and outs of the publishing industry.