Seanan McGuire...

...was born in Martinez, California, and raised in a wide variety of locations, most of which boasted some sort of dangerous native wildlife. Despite her almost magnetic attraction to anything venomous, she somehow managed to survive long enough to acquire a typewriter, a reasonable grasp of the English language, and the desire to combine the two. The fact that she wasn’t killed for using her typewriter at three o’clock in the morning is probably more impressive than her lack of death by spider-bite.

Often described as a vortex of the surreal, many of Seanan’s personal anecdotes end with things like “and then we got the anti-venom” or “but it’s okay, because it turned out the water wasn’t all that deep.” She has yet to be defeated in a game of “Who here was bitten by the strangest thing?” and can be amused for hours by just about anything. Just about anything includes swamps, long walks, long walks in swamps, most of the things that live in swamps, horror movies, strange noises, musical theater, reality television, comic books, finding pennies on the street, and venomous reptiles. Seanan may be the only person on the planet who admits to using Kenneth Muir’s Horror Films of the 1980s as a checklist.

DAW Books published Seanan’s first novel, Rosemary and Rue on September 1st, 2009. Best described as “a fairy tale noir sort of urban fantasy,” it’s the first of three: A Local Habitation and An Artificial Night are set to follow at six-month intervals. She also writes as Mira Grant, and Orbit/OrbitUK published Mira’s first novel, Feed, in May 2010. Seanan’s short fiction has appeared in Ravens in the Library, Grants Pass, and The Edge of Propinquity. She’s working on several other books, just to make sure she never runs out of things to edit.

In her spare time, Seanan writes and records original music, and has three CDs currently available: Pretty Little Dead Girl, Stars Fall Home, and Red Roses and Dead Things (which was produced by BVC member Maya Bohnhoff’s husband, Chef Jeff Vader, All-Powerful God of Biscuits).

Seanan is also a cartoonist, and draws an irregularly posted autobiographical web comic, “With Friends Like These...” Surprisingly enough, she finds time to take multi-hour walks, blog regularly, watch a sickening amount of television, maintain her website, and go to pretty much any movie that has the words “blood,” “night,” “terror,” or “attack” in the title. Most people believe that she doesn’t sleep.

Seanan lives in a creaky old farmhouse in Northern California, which she shares with two cats, Lilly (Siamese) and Alice (Maine Coon), a vast collection of plush things and horror movies, and sufficient books to officially qualify her as a fire hazard. She has strongly-held and oft-expressed beliefs about the origins of the Black Death, the X-Men, and the need for chainsaws in daily life.

Years of writing biographies for convention program books have firmly fixed Seanan in the habit of writing them in the third person, so as to sound marginally less dorky. Stress is on the “marginally.”

Seanan’s CDs:

 Visit Seanan’s website.

See a video of Seanan's booksigning at Borderlands Books in San Francisco at which Book View author, Maya Bohnhoff joined in singing “Mal’s Song” with Vixy and Tony and a portion of Tricky Pixie.