Jenny, an avid reader and blogger for Forever Young Adult, lives with a menagerie of rescued animals who all expect her to read aloud to them. They just don't like it when she sings.
Julie Danielson (Jules) conducts interviews and features of authors and illustrators at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast, a children's literature blog focused primarily on illustration and picture books. Julie received her Master's in Information Sciences, with a focus on children's librarianship. She has juried for the Society of Illustrators' Original Art Award, as well as the BolognaRagazzi Awards for the Bologna Children's Book Fair, and she enjoys speaking and writing about picture books. Her book about children's literature, written with Betsy Bird and the late Peter D. Sieruta, tentatively titled Wild Things, will be published by Candlewick Press in 2014.
John DeNardo is the editor of SF Signal, a Hugo Award-winning group science-fiction and fantasy blog featuring news, reviews and interviews. He also like bagels.
Ana Grilo is a Brazilian living in the UK, where she moved to because of the weather. No, seriously. Together with her evil partner in crime, Thea James, she runs The Book Smugglers, where they review Spec Fiction and YA. World domination via book reviewing is their main agenda. You can also find them over at Twitter.
Patrick Hester is an author, blogger and Hugo-nominated Podcast producer/host who lives in Colorado, writes science fiction and fantasy, and can usually be found hanging out on his Twitter feed. His Functional Nerds and SF Signal weekly podcasts have both been nominated for Parsec awards, and the SF Signal podcast is nominated for a 2012 Hugo Award. He writes for atfmb.com, SF Signal and Functional Nerds.
Thea James is half of the maniacal book review duo behind The Book Smugglers and a newly minted M.S. in digital publishing graduate. When she isn't voraciously devouring the latest and greatest in speculative fiction, or swamped in papers and proposals, she can be found blogging, watching bad horror movies and concocting general plans toward world domination.
J. Kingston Pierce is a longtime Seattle journalist and editor of the crime-fiction blog The Rap Sheet, which has won the Spinetingler Award and been nominated for an Anthony Award. He also writes the book-design blog Killer Covers and serves as the senior editor of January Magazine. Pierce is the author of more than half a dozen nonfiction books, including San Francisco: Yesterday & Today (2009), Eccentric Seattle (2003) and America’s Historic Trails with Tom Bodett (1997). He’s currently at work (oh, so slowly) on his first novel.
Sarah lives in Austin, TX, where she programs film screenings at the Alamo Drafthouse. Tired of feeling like a creepy old lady in the bookstore YA section, she created Forever Young Adult to provide grown-ups with a community where they can gush about young adult literature without shame. In addition to crushing on fictional teenage boys, Sarah enjoys fancy cocktails, dance parties and anything that sparkles (except vampires).
A combination of factors prompted Leila Roy to start expressing her passion for YA books at Bookshelves of Doom in 2004: she’d just moved back to Maine, was missing her friends and was working at a way-boring job. Seven years later – after her wedding, starting library school, buying a house, starting a garden (and in doing so, an inadvertent War With Nature) and finding a way-not-boring job – she’s got a little less reading time, but is still going strong.
