About Me

me up on my nyc rooftop (photo by e)

me up on my nyc rooftop (photo by e)

I’ve kept this blog since 2005, all while I was facing rejections and struggling to find direction, and it’s seen me through some awful and wonderful writing moments. Now that I can’t even pretend the blog is anonymous, here are some things to know about me:

I’m a fiction writer from the Hudson Valley, but I’ve always wanted to live in New York City and I moved here as soon as I could. E and I have been together since we were teenagers, and he’s the most supportive partner I could hope for. (I think he’s cute, too.)

I studied writing & photography at Antioch College and have an MFA in fiction from Columbia University, and I do regret it sometimes. I’ve been awarded fiction fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the MacDowell Colony, which was a magical thing I still don’t believe really happened. My short stories for adults have appeared in Small Spiral Notebook, the New School’s LIT magazine, Orchid, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere.

I’ve wanted to be a writer more than anything in the world. After struggling to publish adult novels, and flirting with the idea of giving up, I jumped into writing for younger readers as a ghostwriter, and it changed my life. My debut novel for tweens, DANI NOIR, is out now in hardcover and ebook from Simon & Schuster / Aladdin. I’m still shocked.

After securing that deal on my own, I started a new novel for young adults—and soon, in a fit of delirium, I sent out queries and the first two chapters and signed with a literary agent in a wild and crazy week of utter insanity. If you corner me to ask about the agent I picked I will probably go on and on about how awesome he is and you may have to ask me to stop it, just warning you now.

Other than that, I worked a day job in publishing for what feels like forever and it was difficult to balance sometimes. But right now I have a new focus: I’m hard at work writing my YA debut, IMAGINARY GIRLS, a story about two sisters and their bond that can’t be broken, which is due out in hardcover tentatively in Summer 2011 from Dutton. And I’m trying to keep myself from being distracted. And I’m getting ready for a residency at Yaddo in 2010. (Can you believe it? I can’t!) And I’ll be hanging on to this blog, telling you all about it as I go. So stay tuned.

For more about me, visit NovaRen.com.

For all things DANI NOIR, visit DaniNoir.com.

For a compilation of interviews I’ve done, see the “Interviews” section in the sidebar of this blog, or visit here.

You can email me at nova [at] novaren [dot] com.

Yes, I’m on Twitter. It’s very distracting.

Thanks for reading and commenting on this blog. I don’t think I’d stay sane without it!