I was born in Connecticut, grew up mostly in Santa Barbara, and have lived my adult life in Los Angeles, where my novels (Where It Began is just the first; there are more on the way) are set.

My husband is a psychologist and my children are a journalist and a filmmaker. (The common theme here seems to be that we’re all deeply interested in dark secrets and stories.)

I have a rescue dog, who is mostly interested in finding shoes to chew, who hangs out with me while I write, which would be perfect if he didn’t enjoy eating paper.

My forays into other careers notwithstanding, I have always wanted to be a writer, and have always, ever since I was first able to write, had notebooks and file folders and bankers’ boxes full of stories, and pieces of stories, and fragments of novels, and random paragraphs.

As a teenager, I saw myself as smart and socially hopeless. Now I see myself as less smart and less hopeless, but I’m still basically the same person I’ve always been; I’m just a lot happier about it.

I believe with all my heart that people have every age they’ve ever been, and every feeling they’ve ever felt, in a rich, messy, mysterious place inside them. And when I dip into all that wonderful, old stuff, YA novels are what I come up with.

You can contact me via email at ann@annstampler.com.