On February 13th, William Sleator blows out the candles on his birthday cake—even if they're in another dimension. He began writing when he was six—both stories and music. He was born in Missouri, graduated from Harvard, and spent the year afterward playing piano at the Royal Ballet School in London. During that time he lived in a forest cottage that had once been a "pest house" for people with smallpox. That experience became his first young adult novel, Blackbriar. He returned to the United States and played rehearsal piano for the Boston Ballet for nine years, also composing three ballets which the company performed. Today, he writes young adult science fiction novels, writing full-time, lives part of the year in Bangkok (Thailand) and part of the year in Boston.
