About Clare B. Dunkle

THE FOLLOWING INFORMATION IS
AVAILABLE ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

"Former librarian Clare B. Dunkle is a writer worth watching. Gifted with the ability to create unique historical fantasy novels with a narrative pull like a Hoover, she wins fanatically dedicated readers right and left."
—Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books

I was born Clare Buckalew in Fort Worth, Texas, and grew up in Denton, Texas, a city north of Dallas. I earned my B.A. in Russian with a minor in Latin from Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. After graduating from Indiana University with a master's degree in library science, I came back to San Antonio to work. I earned tenure as the monographs cataloger at Trinity University's Coates Library from 1990 to 1999; then I left the library to homeschool my two daughters, Valerie and Elena. My family moved to Germany in 2000, and we lived for seven years in the Rheinland Pfalz region, not far from the old Roman city of Trier. We returned to San Antonio in the summer of 2007, when my younger daughter Elena graduated from high school and began college.

From April, 2001 to March, 2004, my daughters attended a German boarding school for girls, and I began to write books for them. They read my first four books as a series of letters from home.

Since then, I have written eight books:

The Hollow Kingdom, published in 2003;
Close Kin, published in 2004;
By These Ten Bones, published in 2005;
In the Coils of the Snake, published in 2005;
The Sky Inside, published in 2008;
The Walls Have Eyes, published in 2009;
The House of Dead Maids, a Wuthering Heights prequel, published in September, 2010; and
Vanishing Girl (working title), a memoir cowritten with my daughter Elena about her seven-year battle with anorexia nervosa, currently with my agent.

I am currently working on Bones of Coral (working title), a YA mermaid/monster story.

At this relatively early point in my career, my books have sold over 70,000 copies and attracted the attention of critics as well as teens. The Hollow Kingdom won the Mythopoeic Award for Best Children's Fantasy Book and earned a Publishers Weekly starred review and a Publisher's Weekly "Flying Start" among other honors. Close Kin and By These Ten Bones both landed on the New York Public Library "Books for the Teen Age" lists, and By These Ten Bones made the shortlist for the Dorothy Canfield Fisher Children's Book Award and the Mythopoeic Award as well. In the Coils of the Snake earned a starred review from Booklist and a place on the VOYA "Best Books for Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Horror" list. The Sky Inside earned a starred review from Booklist and a place on the Booklist Core Collection: Dystopian Literature list, as well as a spot on the Grand Canyon Reader Award list. Its jacket art landed on Booklist's cover. The House of Dead Maids has earned a star from The Horn Book.

Three of my books have been named Bank Street College of Education Best Children's Books. The three titles of The Hollow Kingdom Trilogy have been Junior Library Guild selections and have been scheduled for foreign language editions.

When I wrote The Hollow Kingdom, I had no agent and no fiction-publishing experience. I am deeply grateful that the manuscript found a home on its first trip out into the world and that Reka Simonsen, my editor at Holt, lavished such care on it. Reka and I worked happily together on The Hollow Kingdom Trilogy and By These Ten Bones. From the start, Reka was a kindred soul.

Ginee Seo of Atheneum (Simon & Schuster) acquired The Sky Inside and The House of Dead Maids for her own imprint of Ginee Seo Books and asked me to write The Walls Have Eyes for her. I learned an enormous amount working with Ginee, and I will always value her insight and friendship. But in late 2008, Ginee Seo left Atheneum, and I returned to my beloved first editor, Reka. She and I completed The House of Dead Maids, which came out in September, 2010, and have begun work on Bones of Coral.

Becoming an author has not diminished my love for my first career. I am proud to be a librarian. At Indiana University, passionate instructors imparted to me not just the technique but the joy of this vocation. Their teaching lives on in my work in a thousand ways. During my time at Trinity, I contributed articles on librarianship to the professional literature, including two published in The Journal of Academic Librarianship. I was a member of the American Library Association and served on committees in ALCTS, ACRL, and LITA. My ultimate dream is to return to ALA one day and enjoy the conference without the stress of being on a committee.