Merrie Haskell’s novels are The Princess Curse, Handbook for Dragon Slayers and The Castle Behind Thorns. She won the Schneider Family Book Award (Middle Grades) and the DetCon1 Middle Grade Speculative Fiction award, and she was twice a finalist for the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children’s Literature. Her short fiction has appeared in Nature, Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, and various anthologies. She lives in Michigan and works in a library with 7.5 million volumes.