Libba Bray

Martha Elizabeth Bray was born in Montgomery, Alabama.^[1] Her father was a gay^[2] Presbyterian minister, and her mother was an English teacher.^[3][4]

She and her family moved to West Virginia for a brief period,^[5] then to Corpus Christi, Texas, and finally to Denton, Texas,^[2] where Bray attended high school.^[5] At the age of eighteen, three weeks after graduating high school, Bray was involved in a serious car accident.^[2] She had to undergo thirteen surgeries over six years to reconstruct her face, and has an artificial left eye because of the accident.^[6]

Bray graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 1988 as a theater major.^[1] When her childhood best friend, who was living in Manhattan, called saying she was looking for a roommate, Bray moved to New York City.^[7]

Bray was married to Barry Goldblatt, a children's book agent, with whom she shares a son, Josh.^[3][8]

Bray's first job was in the publicity department of Penguin Putnam, followed by three years at Spier, an agency specializing in book advertising.^[7]

Bray was encouraged to write a young adult novel by her husband, a children's book agent, and Ginee Seo, an editor at Simon & Schuster. Before this, using a pseudonym, she had written three books for 17th Street Press.^{[7][clarification needed]}

Her first novel, A Great and Terrible Beauty, became a New York Times bestseller.^{[citation needed]} In November 2006, a video promoting the book was a part of The Book Standard's Teen Book Video Awards.^[9] She wrote two more books to finish the Gemma Doyle Trilogy: Rebel Angels and The Sweet Far Thing.^[10]

Going Bovine was published by Delacorte in 2009 and won the Michael L. Printz Award from the American Library Association recognizing literary excellence in young adult literature.^[11] It is a dark comedy about a 16-year-old boy named Cameron who has mad cow disease. He and his friends, a 16-year-old hypochondriac video gamer with dwarfism named Gonzo and a punk angel named Dulcie who spray-paints her wings, go on a mission to cure Cameron's disease.^[12]

Beauty Queens, about a group of beauty pageant contestants whose plane crashes on an island, was published by Scholastic Press in May 2011.^[13]

Bray's novel, The Diviners, was published on September 18, 2012.^[14] It centers around Evie O'Neill, a seventeen-year-old with a special power who has been sent to live with her uncle in New York City in 1926.^[15] The sequel, Lair of Dreams, was released in August 2015^[16] and the third book, Before The Devil Breaks You, was released in October 2017.^[17] The fourth and final book in the series, The King of Crows, was released in February 2020.^{[citation needed]}