Thursday, October 13, 2011

Jennifer Lynn Barnes


Ok... so I thought maybe I was going crazy about Jennifer's experience working with primates in the wild, but no... on her Bio taken from Amazon.com (below), she mentions it.  So, I'm not crazy.

You can find her website here:  Jennifer Lynn Barnes

...and get the scoop on her new, creepy book coming out on December 27th.





I'm a Jennifer who goes mostly by Jen, an Oklahoma girl who's spent the past eight years living in Connecticut and England, and a writer who has a not-so-secret double life as a cognitive scientist. I love pop culture, mythology, science, superheroes, Joss Whedon, guacamole, television targeted at teenagers, and any song that I know the lyrics to. I have no sense of direction, but can read a book and shower at the same time. As is probably obvious, I do not particularly excel at writing my own bios.

I started writing professionally when I was a teenager and completed my first four published novels (Golden, Tattoo, Platinum, and The Squad: Perfect Cover) while I was in college. After graduation, I took a year off before grad school and spent that year doing autism research in England, courtesy of the generous support of the US-UK Fulbright Commission. While in England, I wrote two more books, The Squad: Killer Spirit and Fate, and tried not to embarrass myself too frequently by inadvertently using British slang with a somewhat-Southern accent.

Currently, I'm a full-time graduate student at Yale University, working on a PhD in developmental psychology, which basically means I spend a lot of time thinking about the way the mind works and designing and running experiments that probe the way that young children and non-human primates view the world. My experiences working with primates in the wild and my love of the supernatural led me to writing a book about a human girl who grows up around pack animals- specifically, werewolves. Raised By Wolves is, to me, a coming of age story that pits nature versus nurture: if you were a human girl raised in a werewolf pack, how human would you really be?