var authors = {
'anderson' : "M.T. Anderson's satirical science fiction novel Feed was a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the LA Times Book Award; his Gothic historical novel The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Volume One, won the National Book Award and the Boston Globe/Horn Book Award. He has also written music criticism, picture books, and stories for adults. For many years, he was fiction editor of 3rd bed, a journal of experimental poetry and prose.",
'black' : "Holly Black is the bestselling author of several contemporary fantasy novels for younger and older readers, including Tithe Valian, Ironside, The Spiderwick Chronicles, and the graphic novel series, The Good Neighbors. She is an unrepentant geek, having met her husband when they were rival Dungeon Masters and currently living in a house with a secret library hidden behind a bookshelf.",
'bray' : "Libba Bray is the author of the New York Times bestselling Gemma Doyle Trilogy, which includes the novels A Great and Terrible Beauty, Rebel Angels, and The Sweet Far Thing. She is also the author of the comedic novel, Going Bovine. Besides Geektastic, she has contributed stories to Restless Dead, Up All Night, and Vacations from Hell. Sometimes she tells people she's won the National Book Award, but then M. T. Anderson comes by and asks for his back, 'cause he's grabby like that. Libba is a longtime geek and is fluent in many geek languages including, but not limited to, theater geek, showtunes geek (yes, they are different), music geek, sci-fi TV geek, bad movies geek, "Rocky Horror" geek, campy geek, Hammer Horror geek, and Valley of the Dolls geek, which deserves a category all its own. As a teenager, she saw The Rocky Horror Picture Show every weekend for nearly two years. Any photos that surface of her in a gold lamè top, heavy eyeliner, and tap shoes are absolutely fabricated, especially if the subject in question is sporting a mullet.",
'castellucci' : "Cecil Castellucci is the author of three young adult novels—Boy Proof, The Queen of Cool, and Beige—and the Plain Janes graphic novel series. Her books have received starred reviews and been on the American Library Association's Best Books for Young Adults (BBYA), Quick Pick for Reluctant Readers, Great Graphic Novels for Teens, and the Amelia Bloomer lists. Cecil waves her geek flag high. She waited on the Star Wars Episode One line on Hollywood Boulevard for six weeks, she invited Batman to her fourth birthday party, and she has a collection of broken action figures.",
'clare' : "Cassandra Clare is the New York Time bestselling author of City of Bones, City of Ashes, and City of Glass. City of Bones was a 2007 Locus Award finalist for Best First Novel. She is also the author of the upcoming YA fantasy trilogy The Infernal Devices. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her boyfriend and two cats. She is also the author of the extremely geeky online Lord of the Rings parody The Very Secret Diaries.",
'green' : "John Green is the Printz Award-winning author of the novels Looking for Alaska, An Abundance of Katherines, and Paper Towns. He is also an unabashed fan of underappreciated roleplaying games, most particularly Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Game.",
'greg' : "Greg Leitich Smith channeled his student days at a math-science magnet high school into the Peshtigo School novels Ninjas, Piranhas, and Galile , which won a Parents' Choice Gold Award, and Tofu and T. rex, both published by Little, Brown. Greg has long been a fan of Star Trek, although he was disappointed as a child when he found out it was fiction and that we had only recently made it to the moon. The starship Enterprise (NCC-1701E) adorned his wedding cake. (The actual ceremony, alas, was not performed in Klingon.)
Cynthia Leitich Smith is the author of Tantalize, which was a Borders Original Voices selection and a New York Public Library Book for the Teen Age, and its companion novel, Eternal. Blessed, a third book set in the universe, and a Tantalize graphic-novel adaptation are in the works. Cynthia also has written several YA short stories and award-winning books for younger readers. She teaches in the MFA program in Writing for Children and Young Adults at Vermont College. Back in the day, Cynthia and her husband Greg made a twice-weekly ritual out of each all-new Buffy: The Vampire Slayer or Angel episode and are now addicted to the comic adaptations. They both speak fluent "Scooby."",
'larson' : "Hope Larson is the author and illustrator of several graphic novels, including Gray Horses and Chiggers. Her short stories have been featured in the New York Times and several anthologies, notably the Flight series and Image Comics' Tori Amos - inspired Comic Book Tattoo. Larson has been nominated for awards in the United States, Canada, and Europe, and is the recipient of a 2006 Ignatz Award and a 2007 Eisner Award. She holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and lives in Asheville, North Carolina, with her husband and four cats. She used up all her geek points when she started drawing comics professionally.",
'levithan' : "All of the science facts in David Levithan's story had to be found and/or checked on the Internet. The English facts came from his head. Take out the Internet part, and you pretty much have a summation of his academic career from kindergarten through college. David's books include Boy Meets Boy, The Realm of Possibility, Are We There Yet?, Marly's Ghost, Wide Awake, Love is the Higher Law, and (with Rachel Cohn) Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist and Naomi & Ely's No Kiss List. His next book is a collaboration with John Green, entitled Will Grayson, Will Grayson. He still remembers who wrote Cry, the Beloved Country, but has completely forgotten how to work a sine or a cosine.",
'link' : "Kelly Link is the author of the collection Pretty Monsters, as well as Stranger Things Happen and Magic for Beginners. She lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, with her partner, Gavin J. Grant. Together they run Small Beer Press and produce the twice-yearly zine Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet as well as co-edit the fantasy half of The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Link's stories have won the Nebula, the Hugo, and the World Fantasy Awards. When she was in third grade, Kelly read the Lord of the Rings series eight times. Today she's a Katamari Damacy addict, and someone (Holly Black) is finally teaching her how to play D&D.",
'lyga' : "Barry Lyga was a geek long before it was cool to be a geek, back when being a geek meant getting beat up on a regular basis, as opposed to selling that cool new Web app you wrote to a Silicon Valley start-up and retiring at twenty-five. In his time, he's been a comic-book geek, a role-playing geek, a computer geek, and a sci-fi geek, though never a Trekkie, Trekker, or a Whovian, because he has his limits. Barry is the author of The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl (called a "love letter and a suicide note to comic books"), Boy Toy, and Hero-Type. He's still a geek.",
'lynn' : "Tracy Lynn is the pseudonym for Elizabeth J. Braswell. Elizabeth was born in the United Kingdom, to her great surprise. When her parents returned to the United States, she stowed away in their baggage (mega geek points if you know who I stole this from). She is the author of Snow and Rx, and The Nine Lives of Chloe King as Celia Thomson, as well as numerous Disney Pirates of the Caribbean books.",
'mass' : "In her eighth grade yearbook, Wendy Mass was bestowed the dubious honor of Most Likely to Solve Rubik's Cube because she spent so much time fiddling with it instead of paying attention in class. Always fascinated by the night sky, she took Astronomy 101 in college. It was so complicated that she never got higher than 45 out of 100 on any exam. Fortunately, neither did anyone else and the professor graded on a curve. She got an A! She loves writing about astronomy now, and tries to make it so easy to understand that the reader will fall in love with it, too. Wendy is the author of eight novels for young readers, including A Mango-Shaped Space (about a girl with synesthesia), Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life, Every Soul a Star, and Heaven Looks a Lot Like the Mall. She lives in northern New Jersey, where she can be found staring up at the sky with her telescope, or down at the ground with her metal detector, hoping to find gold. She can do Rubik's Cube in less than two minutes.",
'nix' : "Garth Nix is the bestselling and award-winning author of more than seventeen novels, several role-playing magazine articles and scenarios, and an unpublished journal of the five-year Dungeons and Dragons campaign he ran between the ages of 11 and 16. A keen role-player in his student years, Garth was involved in running very large "free-form" role-playing events in the late 1970s and early 1980s in Australia, including the creation of a starport for 250 role-players in a school assembly hall. Long ago he also used to fight duels with PVC pipe swords while wearing a motorcycle helmet and several old leather coats that didn't provide much protection but did slow everything down. Garth is also deeply interested in computers, the weather, military history, strategy and role-playing games, fantasy and science fi ction, and many other highly geektastic subjects. Garth is married, with two children, and lives near a beach in Sydney, Australia.",
'omalley' : "Bryan Lee O'Malley was born in London, Ontario, Canada. In high school he joined choir, chess club, the trivia team, and the computer programming club, got his first job in order to purchase a Sega Genesis, attended LAN parties, played Starcraft from dusk 'til dawn while drinking Coke and eating pizza, tried to get his friends to read comic books that he thought were really cool, and hung out with the theater and band geeks. The head of the arts department still speaks of him fondly. O'Malley went on to become an award-winning cartoonist, with a film, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, in development at Universal. He lives in the United States.",
'yee' : "In high school, Lisa Yee was a member of the varsity debate team, honor society president, and the student rep of the California Scholarship Federation's State Board. In an act of total geek rebellion, Lisa would cut class to go to the library. And once, during science, she threw her fetal pig over the balcony to see what would happen when it landed on someone. She never got caught and was later named Physiology Student of the Year. Lisa's been a TV writer/producer, written jingles, and penned menus for Red Lobster. The winner of the prestigious Sid Fleischman Humor Award and Thurber House Children's Writer-in-Residence, her books include Millicent Min, Girl Genius, Stanford Wong Flunks Big-Time, and YA novel Absolutely Maybe.",
'westerfield' : "Scott Westerfield still owns the original trio of staple-bound D&D rulebooks, purchased when he was twelve, roughly the same time he went to his first fannish event: a Famous Monsters convention in New York City. Since then he's designed computer games, composed twelve-tone music, learned Esperanto, and ridden in a zeppelin. The geekiest thing he's done lately was to devise a tactical combat system for steampunk ironclads played with Lego miniatures. He is the author of the Uglies and Midnighters series, and the novels So Yesterday, Peeps, and The Last Days.",
'zarr' : "Sara Zarr is the author of two critically acclaimed novels for young adults, Sweethearts and Story of a Girl (a 2007 National Book Award finalist). She has also contributed to the anthologies Does This Book Make Me Look Fat?: Stories about Loving - and Loathing - Your Body, and Jesus Girls: True Tales of Growing Up Female and Evangelical. Sara exploded onto the theatrical scene in the role of a greedy bad girl in Linda Mar Elementary's original production, Three for the Money. She continued her career through high school as a passenger in Anything Goes, Theodosia in Bone-Chiller!, and Mollie in The Mousetrap. As an adult, she's appeared in Alice in Wonderland; Oliver!; A Christmas Carol; Look Homeward, Angel; and Judevine, and was a penlight-wearing stage crew member for many other shows. She met her husband while working backstage on a production of Pinocchio. Being married to him has been her favorite role to date."
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