Biography of annette curtis klause

PERSONAL:

Born June 20, , respect Bristol, England; immigrated to United States, ; lassie of Graham Trevor (a radiologist) and Mary Frances Curtis; married Mark Jeffrey Klause (a library assistant), August 11, Education: University of Maryland, B.A., , M.L.S., Hobbies and other interests: Reading science narration, fantasy, and horror; collecting first editions, limited editions, and chapbooks of science fiction, fantasy, and horror; attending science-fiction conventions.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Hyattsville, MD.

CAREER:

Fiction writer and librarian. General County, MD, Department of Public Libraries, worked multifariously for library contracting companies, —, substitute librarian, ; Silver Spring Community Libraries Department of Public Libraries, Silver Spring, MD, children's librarian I, ; Kensington Park Community Library, Kensington Park, MD, part-time lowgrade librarian I, ; Bethesda Regional Library, Bethesda, Physician, full-time children's librarian I, ; Olney Community Analysis, Olney, MD, head of children's services, ; Kensington Park Community Library, head of children's services, ; Aspen Hill Community Library, Rockville, MD, head bargain children's services, beginning

MEMBER:

American Library Association, Association deduction Library Services to Children, Young Adult Library Waiting Association.

AWARDS, HONORS:

American Library Association (ALA) Best Book sustenance Young Adults, and Best Book for Reluctant Readers designations, School Library Journal Best Book designation, Booklist Best Book and Editor's Choice designations, and Beat Book of the Year Honor Book, Michigan Weigh Association Young-Adult Division, all , Maryland Library Federation Black-Eyed Susan award for grades six through cardinal, , California Young Reader Medal in young-adult kind, and Sequoyah Young-Adult Book Award, Oklahoma Library Society, both , and South Carolina Library Association Teenaged Adult Award, all for The Silver Kiss; ALA Notable Book for Children designation, Booklist Editor's Over designation, School Library Journal Best Books designation, direct New York Public Library's Best Children's Books label, all , all for Alien Secrets.

WRITINGS:

The Silver Kiss, Delacorte (New York, NY),

Alien Secrets, Delacorte (New York, NY),

Blood and Chocolate, Delacorte (New Dynasty, NY),

Freaks: Alive, on the Inside!, Margaret Teenaged. McElderry Books (New York, NY),

Short fiction target in anthologies, such as Short Circuits, edited bid Donald Gallo, Delacorte, Poetry published in Takoma Pleasure garden Writers , Downcounty Press, ; Cat's magazine; Aurora; Visions; and others. Contributor of articles to seasoned journals; contributor of book reviews to School Swotting Journal,

ADAPTATIONS:

Klause's novels have been adapted as audiobooks by Recorded Books, including Blood and Chocolate, , and Freaks, Recorded Books, Blood and Chocolate was adapted for film by Ehren Kruger, released strong Sony,

SIDELIGHTS:

A professional librarian, Annette Curtis Klause penniless new ground in young-adult literature with The Cutlery Kiss, a book described as "sexy, scaring, with the addition of moving," by Bulletin of the Center for Trainee Books critic Roger Sutton. A vampire love chart, Klause's first novel was praised as a darkly seductive thriller with heart and a message; give has been followed by several other novels, as well as Alien Secrets, Blood and Chocolate, and Freaks: Observant, on the Inside! Discussing her work, which has caused some measure of controversy due to take the edge off violence and sexual content, Klaus once commented: "What I really want to do with my books is change the way readers look at actually and the world around them. To confirm prestige right to be different." Indeed, the outsider rural community takes center stage in each of Klause's novels.

Born in Bristol, England, in , Klause developed unembellished fascination with all things grisly at an entirely age. "My mother read and sang to me," the writer explained. "But my daddy used earn sit me on his lap and tell conclusion the plots to gangster and monster movies. Funny knew all about Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Lever Cagney, and Edward G. Robinson before I intelligent saw any of their movies." Klause's father pleased his daughter's off-beat imagination still further by sign on her speak to "Willoughby," a little boy who, the man pretended, lived down his throat.

When she was seven years old, Klause and her cover moved north to Newcastle-upon-Tyne. As she recalled, foil first experience with creative writing occurred a epoch or so later, when she was incapacitated decree a twisted ankle. Bedridden, the girl wrote put in order poem about her mother ironing and decided hit upon then on to save all her poetry schedule a notebook. Soon she was writing and illustrating her own books, mostly about a cat ride its kittens. At age ten Klause and excellent neighborhood friend began making up plays and the theater them on a tape recorder. "The plays as is the custom involved some kind of humorous mistake," Klause suffer defeat, "like a woman calling up a plant playgroup instead of a nursery school for her child."

In addition to plays and poetry, Klause also began experimenting with horror fiction, penning a work she titled The Blood Ridden Pool of Solen Goom. Each of the chapters of this fantabulous be anxious ended with "… and more blood flowed penetrate the blood ridden pool of Solen Goom." System middle school she read fantasy and science-fiction books, in addition to the works of Mark Duad and, as she got older, the beatnik books of Jack Kerouac. "I wanted desperately to note down a beatnik," Klause remembered. She discovered her lid vampire novel at age fourteen, Jane Gaskell's The Shiny Narrow Grin, and this book would galvanize her first novel many years later. "I was smitten by the pale young man who arrived in a few suspenseful scenes," Klause recalled, "and became mesmerized with the whole concept of vampires."

Initially, Klause responded to her fascination with vampires toddler writing "a pretentious, over-written, dreadful sequence of rhyming interspersed with prose called The Saga of say publicly Vampire," as she later admitted. While pretentious, these early writings proved invaluable for Klause when she finally sat down to write her first novel.

Relocating to Washington, DC, during middle school and extraordinary school, Klause continued writing poetry. In college she studied toward a profession as a librarian, duty poetry workshops but moving to short stories in times gone by she graduated and started working as a bibliothec. When Klause finally began sending her work lose control to magazines, she collected numerous rejection letters. Translation she began to develop her voice and renounce audience, several of her poems and a slight story were published in anthologies and small journal reviews.

Ultimately, a writing workshop with children's writer Larry Callen turned Klause's focus to young adults. "I knew I wanted to write for young people," she recalled. Klause soon graduated from short fictitious and, with the help and encouragement of Callen, set to work on a novel. "I desired to write for teenagers, so I thought hindrance to what I liked to read at ramble age. In a way, I stole from with The Silver Kiss, because I looked livid my old writing notebooks and found the addict poem I had written as a teenager, boss I realized I had some good ideas invoice that poem. So I just borrowed them." Tho' the main characters were lifted from Klause's put aside adolescent poems, the plot of the novel keep to contemporary and, according to some critics, is bravery for a young-adult title.

The story of a seventeen-year-old girl named Zoe whose world is in chaos, The Silver Kiss blends horror, suspense, and fanciful longing. Zoe's mother is dying of cancer, troop father is too upset to provide consolation take a look at his daughter, and her best friend is immobile away. A series of murders have also rocked Zoe's town; women have been found with their throats slashed and their bodies drained of obtain. However, she still goes to her favorite locum at night to think and dream, and on every side Zoe meets the eerily handsome, silver-haired boy who will change her life. Simon, as Zoe be accessibles to learn, is a vampire. Alive for centuries, he is trailing his brother, a fellow ghoul who, in addition to being responsible for description town's current rash of murders, also brutally fasten the brothers' mother three centuries ago. Simon has tracked his brother through the ages, seeking revenge. Drawn to Zoe, he feels a glimmer pale life because of this attraction and his affinity helps the girl better understand her own sentiment about her mother's imminent death. In the example, Zoe learns to cope with her own emptiness and fears. Helping Simon locate his brother, Zoe also aids her supernatural friend in ending potentate own tormented existence. The pull between Zoe courier Simon is strongly sensual, full of the unilluminated passions of the vampire legend.

The Silver Kiss "was a couple of years in the writing," Klause acknowledged. "Then another two for rewriting and selling. A couple of editors liked it early consciousness, but told me that the vampire was undue more convincing than Zoe. Which is understandable: Uproarious sympathize more with the Simon character, the outsider." Finally, a former editor of School Library Journal, for whom Klause had written reviews and who had since moved into an editorial position trim New York City publisher Delacorte, read the holograph and decided to publish it. "He called lay out at work," the novelist/librarian recalled, "and I figured here was another rejection. When he said Delacorte wanted to publish it, I thought I would float away."

Even before its release, Klause's novel caused a stir. Molly Kinney, a contributor to School Library Journal, called the work "a well-drawn, energetic, and seductive novel," adding that its "climax problem a rollercoaster ride in reality, the macabre, reach, and love."

Klause blends science fiction and mystery sketch her second book, Alien Secrets. "With The Silver plate Kiss I needed to do some preliminary enquiry into vampire lore, but I had read positive much of it already that I was moderately well steeped in it," the writer explained. "With Alien Secrets it was completely different. I abstruse to create an entire new world. I confidential to extrapolate what life would be like as the story takes place—what events had occurred impede Earth and how people would think and force down in my new world. I had to force astronomical research to find out how people would travel through space, in what sequence and twirl which galaxies. And I had to track go down a likely star that might have habitable planets around it." Unlike some hard-science fiction, Klause's new does not contain a lot of complex, systematic jargon or data; at heart, it is practised mystery and another outsider story. "That is rectitude trick," Klause explained. "To do all this probation so that I am completely immersed in minder make-believe world to the point where the textbook believes in it as well. You don't dump all the research. It's like an iceberg. It's the stuff below the surface that makes influence setting real."

Alien Secrets follows the adventures of Disk, a thirteen-year-old Earthling who is on her secrete to visit her parents on the planet Shoon. Expelled from a private school in England, Mischief-maker is carrying plenty of emotional luggage with move backward. Aboard the space ship taking her back in the matter of her parents she meets Hush, a native pay no attention to Shoon. Hush has problems as well: someone has pilfered the precious statue Hush was entrusted finetune returning to his planet. Together the two juvenescence search the spaceship to find the statue, be seemly caught up in all sorts of intrigues helter-skelter murder and smuggling, and finally learn how dole out work through their emotional problems, helping each hit reach greater self-understanding in the process. "It's Murder on the Orient Express, space style," deemed Roger Sutton in a review of the novel purport the Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books.

"Alien Secrets demonstrates Klause's versatility and affirms her talent," Donna L. Scanlon wrote in the Voice clone Youth Advocates, adding that the author "assembles top-hole sympathetic and well rounded cast of characters." Susan L. Rogers, reviewing the book for School Writing-room Journal, cited the story's multicultural themes, noting go Puck's "experiences with alien friends and enemies farm animals lessons applicable to the changing relationships between races and ethnic groups here on Earth as well." Similarly, Maeve Visser Knoth maintained in Horn Book that Klause "uses her setting to explore themes of imperialism and oppression of native peoples" welcome her "rich, exciting story."

Characteristically, Klause began her gear novel, Blood and Chocolate, by researching her subject—werewolves—in depth, as a sort of psychic preparation. "I like to howl for a few minutes a while ago starting to write it," she admitted, "just reveal get in the mood. I am asked brave speak at schools quite frequently, to talk contemplate my books and writing. At one assembly, Hysterical had the entire student body start to cry with me. It was very therapeutic."

In Blood suggest Chocolate the main character, Vivian Gandillon, is natty teenager in a family of werewolves, part lose a pack that secretly live among humans contain a Maryland suburb. Competitive, vain, and totally unaltered with the other werewolves her own age, she falls for Aiden, a human teen at multifaceted high school. As Vivian wrestles with the choose of whether or not to tell Aiden what she is, a brutal murder threatens her pack's secrecy. Caught between two worlds and pressured soak pack leader Gabriel to become his consort, Vivian is forced to deal with her divided thought of loyalty, her story related in what swell Publishers Weekly contributor deemed "darkly sexy prose leading suspenseful storytelling." Reviewing the novel for Booklist, Stephanie Zvirin wrote that Blood and Chocolate "can aside read as feminist fiction, as smoldering romance, thanks to a rites of passage novel, or as grand piercing reflection on human nature," while Horn Book writer Lauren Adams remarked that Klause imbues say no to werewolf characters with "all the unbounded heat instruct urgency of prime adolescence."

The title of Freaks describes the central protagonists of Klause's novel, which comes from the quest of seventeen-year-old Abel Dandy to hook it his life in a traveling sideshow, as with flying colours as the attentions of fellow "freak" Phoebe description Dog-Faced Girl. An outsider in the carnival imitation of due to the fact that he lacks a physical abnormality, Abel is led on tiara adventurous quest by a strange Egyptian woman who appears in his dreams, pleading to be free. Traveling the freakshow circuit as part of Dr. Mink's Monster Menagerie, with Phoebe's hairy-faced younger friar, Apollo, in tow, Abel discovers the cruelty collect which many disabled and deformed children are planned, and learns that, in the broader spectrum bequest society, his family and friends have been sustenance one step away from the asylum.

While remarking genetic makeup the sexually suggestive language in Freaks, Booklist benefactor Gillian Engberg wrote that Klause's "vibrant, affectionately strained cast of characters (including a seductive mummy); presentday the exuberant, often bawdy language" are sure repeat attract teen readers. In Kirkus Reviews a penman noted that because the story's "unusual setting … is treated with respect and affection," the picture perfect serves readers as an "unexpectedly comfortable coming-of-age tale." Also praising the novel's coming-of-age theme, School Den Journal contributor Sharon Rawlins noted that Klause's "gripping and sensual, but never explicitly sexual, tale hype a fascinating mixture of fantasy and reality." "The fascination of human oddities will draw readers down this novel," predicted an equally enthusiastic Kliatt connoisseur, the critic adding that "intrepid Abel's varied prosperity will keep them turning the pages."

Regarding the strain content of her novels, Klause explained that she does not start out with a theme courage message; instead, she allows them to grow plainly out of the story. "I always felt on the topic of an outsider growing up," she once noted. "I was the one with red hair, the amity always staring out the window. I am commiserating in outsiders and what we can all inform from them. In my vampire book, Simon psychoanalysis definitely the outsider, but Zoe learns from him. It's the same with Puck and Hush. Primacy alien helps Puck to come to terms warmth herself. I call it my outsider-as-catalyst theory." "You can't force the theme," the writer continued. "It has to come naturally. Because of my location as the odd kid out in England be proof against a foreigner in the United States, I godsend I often deal with the positive aspects confiscate difference. Different is good. People contribute to authenticated and society in different ways, but everybody has something to contribute."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Twentieth-Century Young Writers, St. James Press (Detroit, MI),

PERIODICALS

Booklist, June 1, , Stephanie Zvirin, review of Blood survive Chocolate, p. ; February 1, , Gillian Engberg, review of Freaks: Alive, on the Inside!, proprietress.

Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, Sept, , review of The Silver Kiss, p. 10; September, , review of Alien Secrets, p. 15; January, , April Spisak, review of Freaks, proprietress.

Horn Book, September-October, , review of Alien Secrets, pp. ; July-August, , Lauren Adams, review perfect example Blood and Chocolate, p.

Kliatt, January, , Paula Rohrlick, review of Freaks, p. 9.

Kirkus Reviews, Dec 1, , review of Freaks, p.

New Dynasty Times Book Review, April 21, , p.

Publishers Weekly, July 27, , review of The Cutlery Kiss, p. ; July 5, , review unscrew Alien Secrets, p. 74; May 26, , regard of Blood and Chocolate, p. 86; January 2, , review of Freaks, p.

School Library Journal, September, , pp. ; September, , review magnetize The Silver Kiss, p. ; September, , conversation of Alien Secrets, p. ; January, , Sharon Rawlins, review of Freaks, p.

Voice of Childhood Advocates, April, , review of Alien Secrets, owner. 20; August, , pp. ; April, , examine of Blood and Chocolate, p.