Raven Belasco has been fascinated by vampires since she was 12 years old. You probably shouldn’t let 12-year-olds read Stoker’s Dracula, but Raven grew up in a house where, if she could get the book off the shelf, she could read it. Anyway, the bloody seeds were planted both for her to become a fan of the paranormal, and a verbose writer.  ;)

Raven also grew up in a small town in Massachusetts, with her backyard mostly comprised of a cemetery filled with graves ranging from the late 1600s through 1800s. If spending your childhood playing on old graves doesn’t prepare you for a career writing about the (un)dead, then probably nothing will.

Continuing in this vein (puns are not optional; sorry—not sorry!) Raven danced and performed for a number of years at the (in)famous ManRay nightclub in Cambridge. In college, she discovered that the nickname bestowed upon her on campus was Queen of the Children of the Night. She was not dismayed by this fact.

For someone who spends so much of her time thinking about blood and violent deaths, Raven actually likes a lot of very life-affirming things: long walks with her dog in the woods, cooking and baking, and yoga. Just to keep things spooky, she still  loves heading out to the local goth night at the club for dancing to songs about vampires and other things that go bumpa-bumpa-bumpa in the night.

Raven writes not just for her own pleasure, but to make books that give any-and-everybody  an enjoyable escape, and to delight fellow geeks with weird historical details and multi-level puns. She wants to pay forward the joy that books have brought her through tough times or otherwise boring waiting-rooms.