About the Author

Stephen Merlino lives in Seattle, Washington where he writes, plays, and teaches high school English. He lives with the world's most desirable woman, two fabulous kids, and three attack chickens. Stephen is a Writers of the Future winner and winner of the PNWA award for Fantasy. His novel, The Jack of Souls, also won an Independent Publishers award. Stephen's path to writing began at the age of eleven, when he discovered Tolkien and dreamed of writing epic tales of his own. In college, when a tenth reading of The Lord of the Rings no longer delivered, he discovered Chaucer and Shakespeare and fell in love with England and its literature. Sadly, the closest he got to England back then was Seattle's Unicorn Pub (and that was run by a Scot named Angus); it wasn't until years later that he'd attend grad school in Berkshire to study Shakespeare. One day, a professor said of Stephen's stories, "You should get these published!" and the old dream stirred. Stephen pursued it, and though those stories remain unsold, the journey showed him the world of agents, craft, critique groups, and the value of what Jay Lake called, "psychotic persistence." The Jack of Souls and its sequels are the result of that happy psychosis.