Libba Bray

Libba Bray
Libba Bray
Born	Martha Elizabeth Bray (1964-03-11) March 11, 1964 (age 62) Montgomery, Alabama, U.S.
Education	University of Texas at Austin
Occupation	Author
Notable work	Gemma Doyle Trilogy
Spouse	Barry Goldblatt (former)
Children	1

Martha Elizabeth "Libba" Bray (March 11, 1964) is an American writer of young adult novels including the Gemma Doyle Trilogy, Going Bovine, Beauty Queens, The Diviners series, and Under the Same Stars.

Life

Martha Elizabeth Bray was born in Montgomery, Alabama. Her father was a gay Presbyterian minister, and her mother was an English teacher.

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

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

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

Career

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

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.^{[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. She wrote two more books to finish the Gemma Doyle Trilogy: Rebel Angels and The Sweet Far Thing.

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. 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.

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

Bray's novel, The Diviners, was published on September 18, 2012. 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. The sequel, Lair of Dreams, was released in August 2015 and the third book, Before The Devil Breaks You, was released in October 2017. The fourth and final book in the series, The King of Crows, was released in February 2020.^{[citation needed]}

Awards and honors

Publications

See also

References

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to Libba Bray.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Libba Bray.

• Official website
• Libba Bray at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Libba Bray at the Library of Congress, with 10 library catalog records