Ellen Klages

Klages grew up in Bexley, Ohio, a few blocks away from the public library, and remembers: “When I was a kid, access to books was segregated. Until you were 12, you could only check out books from the Children’s Room, which had its own rules and customs. I remember picking out a book that had a rocket ship on the spine, but one of the librarians told me I wouldn’t like it. It was science fiction and that was for boys. “The message stuck, for a while. But after graduating from college—with a degree in Philosophy—I moved to San Francisco and worked at the Exploratorium, a museum of science, art, and human perception founded by physicist Frank Oppenheimer. And the rule of thumb there is: Everyone is a scientist. Everyone is an artist. “All it takes is curiosity and the urge to explore—what would happen if… Every day at the museum I’d hear someone exclaim, ‘Wow! Look at this!’ Later, I began to think of history and fiction the same way, getting hooked on a fact or a picture or a chance remark that make me say, ‘Wow! I never thought about that…’ “It’s an attitude I want my characters—and my readers—to share.” Her story, “Basement Magic,” won the Nebula Award in 2005. Several of her other stories have been on the final ballot for the World Fantasy, Nebula, and Hugo Awards, and have been translated into Czech, French, German, Hungarian, Japanese, and Swedish. A collection of her short fiction, Portable Childhoods, was published in 2007. Her first novel, The Green Glass Sea, won the Scott O’Dell Award for historical fiction and the New Mexico State Book Award. It was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award, the Quills Award, and the Locus Award. A sequel, White Sands, Red Menace, was published by Viking in 2008. It has a rocket ship on the cover.
(Ellen's website: http://ellenklages.com)

10 Things About Ellen Klages
(Three of these are not true. See if you can guess which.)

1. Ellen was born in 1954 at Mt. Carmel Hospital in Columbus Ohio.
2. She once smoked a joint with Lily Tomlin.
3. She was the Minister of Propaganda for a nudist colony.
4. She was a Sunday School teacher.
5. She has never eaten human flesh.
6. When she rents a car in a new city, she turns the radio to the country station.
7. She has a collection of Chicken-of-the-Sea tuna items.
8. She was once a bouncer at a pinball arcade.
9. She writes her first drafts on a manual typewriter.
10. She used the F-word in each of her high school term papers.