Megan Frazer

Here is the official back of the book biography:

Megan Frazer is an author for young adults. Her first novel, Secrets of Truth & Beauty, was published by Disney-Hyperion in July of 2009. She lives with her husband and son in Maine where she is a high school librarian. She graduated from Columbia with a degree in English and was in the first class to complete the Undergraduate Creative Writing Certificate Program. She earned her Master’s in Library Science from Simmons GSLIS. Currently, she is enrolled in the University of Maine’s Master of Education in Literacy with a Concentration in Writing and the Teaching of Writing.

Here is something a bit more rambling and in the first person:

I’ve always loved writing, so I think in some ways it comes as no surprise that I ended up here. Of course, there were other things I loved as a child, like singing and dancing, and yet I am not in any way shape or form doing that, and the thought of singing in public makes my whole body tense. As a further tangent, my first career aspiration was that of Solid Gold Dancer, and if they really want to bring back a great show from the past, that would win my vote.

But back to the writing. I was lucky enough to go to an elementary school in New Hampshire that really promoted writing. We would write stories and then “publish” them by copying them into a book that had a cover made out of wallpaper scraps. Normally the student wrote his or her version, and the teacher would write a corrected version above it. I had no interest in publishing something with errors, and insisted that only the correct version be included.

I was also very into writing poetry. Here’s an early masterpiece:

Oh Halloween, what a night!

Trick or treating in the pale moonlight.

But I’ll be careful for there just may be

A little ghost following me!

I decided on writing as a career in 6th grade after a class writing assignment in which the teacher read us the beginning of a story, and we had to write our own endings. I liked my ending better than that in the actual story.

What kind of writer I wanted to be varied over the years. There was a phase where I wanted to be the next Torey Hayden. I wanted to be a screenwriter. In high school I read first Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War and then Beyond the Chocolate War (which I liked even better than the first), and thought, There need to be more books like this for teens. And though I strayed from the path of writing YA for a long time, I finally came back.

I studied writing in college, which was very useful, but I also went to a college that required you to take classes in a wide range of disciplines, and that was perhaps more useful. When it comes to being a writer, I believe the more of the world you are exposed to the better. I have traveled to places out of my comfort zone, and, even if I never write directly about these experiences, I am sure they inform my writing.

I wrote Secrets of Truth & Beauty while living in Boston (well, actually, Cambridge and Somerville). Most of the first draft I wrote on the train while commuting to my job as a high school librarian in the city. My then fiance, now husband, and I moved to Maine, got married, and shortly after I sold the book to Disney-Hyperion. Almost two years after that sale, in July of 2009, Secrets of Truth & Beauty will be available in stores