- Biography -
I wonder if all author bios on book jackets are as noteworthy for what they omit as mine is. The good people at Atheneum make me sound way cooler than I actually am: Jennifer Bradbury is an English teacher living in Burlington, Washington. She and her husband took a two-month long bicycling trek from Charleston, South Carolina, to Los Angeles, California for their honeymoon, changing more than fifty flat tires along the way. She was also a one-day winner of Jeopardy! Shift is her first novel.
It says nothing about my weird allergies. It also fails to mention I woke up on my 18th birthday with half my face paralyzed (I got better). Nowhere is record of the fact that I once got stuck on a giant water toy on a lake, or that I had a cast on my nose after my sister threw a baseball at me. And it certainly doesn't indicate my habit of binge watching DVD's of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Battlestar Galactica, Firefly or certain BBC shows. There are many other details it skims over, all of which will prove invaluable for those of you writing book reports or simply curious enough to visit this page to find out more.
Jennifer Bradbury is an English teacher... I am (or was) an English teacher. I know how unutterably fascinating this makes me. Actually, I'm currently on leave to try out being a full-time mom who writes during naptime. So far I love it, but I do miss the students and staff at Burlington-Edison High School. It was there that I fell in love with YA literature, and even shared my early efforts with my ninth grade writing classes. Shift was actually workshopped in draft form by two groups of ninth grade students—the boys in one class are still disappointed that I was unable to order the cover designer to put a "hot girl on a bike" on the cover. They didn't care that no hot girls actually rode bikes in the book.
...living in Burlington, Washington I haven’t always lived in the Evergreen state, but it definitely has become home. I grew up in Owensboro, Kentucky. If you email my sister, she can tell you all the famous people from there, even though she won't include me on the list. I attended college at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, and spent a semester abroad at Cambridge University in England. During college and a bit after, I worked summers at Camp Rockmont in North Carolina. Even though it was a boys' camp, they hired a few women every year to keep the place civil. I was on the adventure team—working as a guide for rock climbing and backpacking trips, as well as food prep for large-scale campouts. Before you start thinking again that I'm cool, I got lost a lot in the woods and didn't know how to climb when I was hired. I was, however, something of a prodigy at making grits for 120 people at once.
Most recently, we lived in India. I participated in a Fulbright Teaching Exchange in the fall of 2005, teaching at Bhavan Vidyalya in Chandigarh, a few hours north of Delhi. It was a fantastic time. Strangely enough, it was here that the story of two boys who go on a cross-country bike trip began to take shape. I wrote it during breaks at school, accompanied often by two kindergarteners, Aryan and Vashunhdara, who spoke little English but were very excited by my progress.
She and her husband took a two-month long bicycling trek from Charleston, South Carolina, to Los Angeles, California for their honeymoon... I did ride my bike across the southern US. I've also bike toured in Alaska (not really recommended—very pretty but VERY spread out) and the San Juan Islands off the Washington coast. The latter was our first trip with our infant daughter, who did her miles napping in a trailer. Bike touring is an amazing way to see the world, and we do hope to grab a couple of tandems one day and waste a lot of time wandering through Europe. Our honeymoon trip was actually my husband's second cross-country ride—like Chris and Win, he and his best friend took off after they graduated high school. The parallels end there, but many of the anecdotes in the book come from our combined experiences. We did spend a night in jail, changed a lot of flat tires, and even scamped a few times.
She was also a one-day winner of Jeopardy! I was on Jeopardy! It was over five years ago, and still it seems to be the thing my friends and family most enjoy sharing about me. It’s a little weird to be celebrated for my weird ability to recall trivia, but it was a fun ride. I did win one day, but got destroyed the next show by a woman who described herself as "part Klingon, part Corleone." And I really embarrassed myself by missing a question about Voltaire even though one of my classes was studying him at the time. The day after it aired, the first thing my students said was, "I had no idea you had such big lips." I don't wear a lot of makeup in real life, so it was a bit of a shock for many in the audience. They do say the camera adds ten pounds...
Shift is her first novel. Shift is my first published novel, but it's actually the third novel I've tried to write. I still love things about those earlier stories, but it's been really fun to learn to work at something and improve. My advice for writers? Keep going.