About Stephanie
Short Bio
Stephanie Willing is a children’s book author and audiobook narrator who has been crafting stories since she was old enough to hold a pencil. She loves to look for magic hidden in the everyday world, and she will never be able to choose a favorite between unicorns or science. She holds an MFA in Writing for Children from Lesley University. She is represented by Alexandra Levick at Writers House.
Her debut middle grade novel, West of the Sea, has Texas skies, dinosaurs, shape-shifting cryptids, new friends, and a complicated family. It’s a fantastical love letter to everyone who has ever felt they have to hide who they are to keep the ones they love happy and safe.
Her upcoming book, She Came Back Different, is a middle grade horror novel set at a finishing school that promises to “perfect” every student by their annual Nutcracker performance. The newest cohort of girls will have to fight a deeply intrenched insidious enemy with everything they’ve got if they want to survive their first semester.
Stephanie is a mom to two young boys, she loves Tex-Mex food, and she never skips a chance to visit the dinosaurs at the American Museum of Natural History. She lives in New Jersey with her family, and she identifies as bisexual.
Long Bio
Stephanie Willing grew up in Cleburne, Texas, the oldest of four children. As a kid she loved reading, writing stories and poetry, drawing, and pretending she was a wild animal (usually a fox). As she got older, that evolved into imagining herself as her favorite literary heroines and wandering the wild acres her family lived on and assigning fairy-tale names to the land around her, ala L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables. Landscape has always felt alive to her, and writing West of the Sea was originally inspired by the sight of wind-swept wheat fields looking like the ocean under the moon and the thought, “What if a mermaid lived in there?” There are no mermaids in the final version of her book, but the idea of a water creature living far from the sea stuck with her for over twenty years.
Stephanie was homeschooled from junior high through high school before attending Texas Woman’s University with a major in Dance and a double minor in Women’s Studies and English. After graduation she worked at a used bookstore and promised herself that one day her books would be on bookstore shelves too.
She moved from Texas to New York City to be a dancer and actor, but she never stopped writing. Her stage acting evolved into a wonderful audiobook career which freed her up to focus on writing and having a family. She got her MFA in Writing for Children from Lesley University, learning from the incredible Tracey Baptiste, Michelle Knudsen, Jason Reynolds, Chris Lynch, Susan Goodman, and David Elliott. She was a 2017 PitchWars contestant, mentored by fellow middle-grade author Hannah Karena Jones. Stephanie signed with Alexandra Levick at Writers House the following spring, and her debut middle grade novel, West of the Sea, was sold in a two-book deal to Margaret Rosenthal at Viking Children’s. West of the Sea received a starred review from Publishers Weekly and was a Junior Library Guild Selection.
She is currently working on her next book and inhaling as much middle grade, young adult, and adult horror as she can while still being able to sleep at night. When she’s not writing or recording audiobooks, Stephanie loves taking dance classes, drinking coffee while walking through bookstores, and sitting by the fire pit with her friends and family. She’s a bisexual, elder millennial, ex-vangelical, and eldest daughter (iykyk) and she lives in New Jersey.