Sarah Smith has been telling stories since she was five years old and living in Japan, and writing every day for pleasure since 11, but Mitch Kapor’s program Agenda, the Cambridge Speculative Fiction Workshop, and Mark Bernstein of Eastgate Systems changed her life and got her writing for other people. It’s still something of a surprise to her when someone she doesn’t know has read one of her books.

Smith’s first young adult mystery, provisionally titled Haunted, about two high-school students, the ghost of a little boy, and fifty million dollars in blood money, will appear from Atheneum/Simon & Schuster in fall 2010. She is also the author of the modern standalone Chasing Shakespeares, about the Shakespeare authorship controversy, and three historical mysteries, The Vanished Child, The Knowledge of Water, and A Citizen of the Country. The Vanished Child and The Knowledge of Water were named New York Times Notable Books of the Year. They have been published in twelve languages and in the UK, and have reached bestseller status here and abroad. Chasing Shakespeares has been made into a play, and The Vanished Child has been optioned for film.

In addition, Smith is the author of three hypertextual novels (novels meant to be read on the computer or the Web) and, with other members of the CSFW, is a coauthor of Future Boston, a science fiction novel about Boston’s “history” for the next hundred years. Her poems and stories have appeared in magazines and anthologies, and her translation of Léa Silhol’s ”Emblemata“ appears in Interfictions 1, edited by Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss, available from Small Beer Press. She is a member of the East Coast All-Stars writing group, with Delia Sherman, Ellen Kushner, Holly Black, Kelly Link, and Cassandra Clare.