Kholli Blek

Holly Black is an American writer.

Raised in a house where there were always many books, amid mysterious stories about fairy-tale creatures that her mother told her and her sister, Holly began writing poems, stories, and plays while still in school. Among her early works was also the fantasy novel The Knights of the Silver Sun. After graduating from school, she went with her friend and future husband, Theo Black, to New Jersey, where she enrolled in college. After graduating from New Jersey College with a bachelor’s degree in English literature in 1994, Holly decided to pursue a second profession and began studying library science at the school of Rutgers State University, while taking part-time work as an editor for medical journals.

In 1999, Holly married her school friend Black, who by then had gained recognition as an artist-illustrator and web designer. She was occasionally published in 8d, a magazine devoted to role-playing games, and in 2002 her first fantasy novel, Tithe: A Modern Faerie Tale (published in Russian as Enchanted), was released by Simon & Schuster in New York; it received favorable reviews from critics and was included by the American Library Association on its list of recommended reading for teenagers. The action of the novels Valiant: A Modern Tale of Faerie (2005) and Ironside: A Modern Faery’s Tale (2007) takes place in the same fantasy world, inhabited by the fairy beings known as faerie and neighboring the real world. Valiant was awarded the Andre Norton Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature and was a finalist for the Mythopoeic Awards.

Soon after her successful debut, Holly Black and Tony DiTerlizzi, whom she met while working for 8d, began the children’s fantasy novel series The Spiderwick Chronicles. In 2003, the first three books in the series were published at once: The Field Guide, The Seeing Stone, and Lucinda’s Secret. They were followed by the novels Ironwood Tree (2004