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Stefan Bachmann was born in Colorado and stayed there for about five minutes until his parents decided they would rather live in Switzerland. They moved into a hundred-year-old house outside of Zurich and he's been there ever since. He is a student of classical music at the Zurich Conservatory and the winner of a bevy of prizes few people have ever heard of. His debut, gothic-steampunk-faery-fantasy The Peculiar, was published by Greenwillow/HarperCollins in Fall 2012 and was a New York Times Editor's Choice as well as a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2012, with rights selling in seven languages.Katherine Catmull - Cataloger and Philosopher of Scientific Marvels with a particular focus on Jars of Moonlight, Frozen Flowers, Broken Fish Fins, Shiny Things Found On Pavements, and Bringing Cookies to Meetings.
Katherine Catmull looks friendly but she isn’t really very. She can usually be found lurking at home with her feral cat and her husband, who has disturbing eyebrows. Her novel Summer and Bird is about two sisters who try to find their vanished parents and find quite a lot of awful and exciting things instead, from an evil queen to a snake as long as the world is wide. Chapter 6 begins “The Puppeteer was full of dead birds,” if that gives you any idea. Her next book is due out in 2014, and I’m sure it will be just as creepy. Katherine is also an actor (and you know what they’re like) and does voiceover work for games like DC Universe Online (where she is the voice of Oracle, as well as a ravenous female zombie, a most unpleasant Atlantean, and others) and Wizard 101 (where she is Myrella Windspar, your faithful real estate salescat).Claire Legrand - Dark Puppetress and Master Librarian, specializing in Dancing Accoutrements, Unicorn Paraphernalia, and the Especially Gruesome Relics of Botched Time Travel.
Claire Legrand is cheerful when you first meet her and
increasingly disturbing the better acquainted with her you become. This
might be why she feels so at home sorting through ancient tomes written
with wicked intent and charred fingernails of great potential. But never fear: She will happily sit in the
sunshine and discuss unicorns with you while sipping hot chocolate, her
absolute favorite beverage.
Her first novel, The Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls, a NYPL Best Book of 2012, is about a
girl who must face off with a sadistic orphanage director to
save her slovenly yet charming best friend. Her second novel, The Year of Shadows,
is about ghosts -- good ones and bad ones -- and a haunted symphony
hall, and twelve-year-old Olivia, who would be right at home at the
Cabinet, for she enjoys sketching pictures of the strange and dreadful.
Curator Legrand's third novel, Winterspell, is for young adult readers, and contains lots of violent swordplay and kissing, the latter of which, as we all know, leads to cooties.Emma Trevayne - Collector of Auditory Oddities, Whimsical Words, and Cryptic Cyphers. Pays special attention to petrichor, things that glimmer, and mechanical body parts.
Emma Trevayne is often mistaken for a unicorn because of her hair, which makes her slightly nervous around Curator Legrand at Cabinet meetings. Her dog is convinced butterflies are really fairies in disguise. (And if you saw the size of his jaws, you wouldn't argue with him either.) She is that very special type of person who reads dictionaries for fun, hovering with held breath over words such as fiendish, lucifugous, and malevolence. Over a meal entirely made up of cakes and chocolate, she will tell you strange and terrible things about violent houseplants. Her first novel, Coda, is for teenagers and is about music that makes you feel very odd indeed, but she has also written a middle grade steampunk fairytale, in which she did unforgivable things to famous landmarks and laughed the whole time. Clearly, whichever age group she writes for, the normal rules of science and nature (and perhaps, politeness and decency) are there to be broken.
