About the Author

I never thought I'd be an author. In fact, if you'd asked a five-year-old me, living in Richmond, Virginia with her parents and little sister, what she wanted to be when she grew up, she wouldn't have been able to give you a single answer. It would have been some hybrid non-job, a professional chimera of sorts, part artist, part horseback rider, part musician, part office worker, part chef. All I knew at that stage in life was that I was interested in everything and I hated being bored. If you had asked teenage me, living in Chicago, Illinois, the child of two MBA-trained parents, what she wanted to be when she grew up, her answer would have been a bit more practical. "I dunno, something with business," I had been known to say, accompanied by an adolescent shrug and a cliché of an eyeroll. In college, faced with the prospect of choosing a major, (or, "concentration" as my fellow students at Brown University would remind me) I would be forced to pick a lane. And since I had long abandoned my dreams of someday becoming a sculptor-equestrian-floutist-accountant-culinary artist, I chose a path that seemed practical and interesting at the time: computer science. I threw myself into computer science whole-heartedly, nearly finishing the major by the end of my junior year, along with a half dozen TA positions, an internship each at Google and Facebook, and with a lucrative job offer waiting for me in San Francisco when I graduated, as an Android engineer at Facebook. But I suppose I never fully evicted that five-year-old from my psyche. The one who wanted to be everything. An artist, a horseback rider, a musician, an office worker, a chef ... and an author, apparently.I had always loved words: big words, funny words, word games, word puzzles, alphabet soup, you name it. And as a freshman in college I (almost by accident) became a crossword constructor, too, publishing my first crossword in Brown's puzzle week in the New York Times. And by the time I was a junior in college, I formalized that love of words by declaring a second concentration in literary arts, simply because I had taken so many of the required classes already, just for fun, that I figured I may as well receive a degree for it. I even started writing a book. It was the summer I was working at Google, and for some reason they didn't have much work for me to do, so, as a respite from playing pool and eating five meals a day in Google's myriad cafeteria, I began to draft my magnum opus. It was a YA dystopian novel called The Frozen City that was nearly 100,000 words, began with a prologue that was also a dream sequence and a flashback, and I spent three years revising it and querying it before realizing that maaaaybe I needed some help if I was going to actually do this author thing for real. Maybe I needed to get an MFA. I was working at Uber by this point, still as an Android engineer, but I enrolled in Hamline University's low-residency MF

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