Sarah Avery

Her first book to appear in print is Tales from Rugosa Coven, a trio of linked novellas about a coven of very modern Wiccans in a New Jersey even weirder and more absurd than the one you think you know.

Avery is an escaped academic who taught way too many sections of freshman composition. After earning a doctorate in English with a dissertation on modernist poetry, she spent a few weeks driving around the Adirondacks blasting Tori Amos on the car stereo and asking herself, What would happen if I stopped holding back? The answer turned out to be a return to her first literary love, fantasy fiction. As a mildly entrepreneurial private tutor, she's able to get almost all the best parts of teaching with almost none of the annoying parts.

She grew up as an Army brat in Kentucky and Korea, Japan and Germany, with a long enough run in Maryland to think of it as home. She moved to New Jersey for grad school and accidentally made a life there for 20 years. Sarah married her high school sweetheart and lives in Maryland with her husband and sons.