From the author's official website:
Hester Young was born in Boston
on the tenth of November, right around the time of year that New England begins its transformation from a place of colorful leaves and bountiful harvest to a sad display of autumnal decay. A November
baby in both mind and spirit, Hester taught herself to read at the age
of four and soon gravitated towards books with tragically orphaned
heroines. Her favorite games as a child involved climbing trees, sword
fighting playmates with sticks, and trying to escape from an imaginary
internment camp.
Hester began writing in the first grade. Her
early works were diverse in their subject matter, covering such topics
as elephant death, divorce, selective mutism, and killer bells. As a
high school freshman, she authored a long-running soap opera for her
friends which featured said friends having passionate and tumultuous
relationships with assorted film and television heartthrobs, plus some
cute seniors. Though her audience was admittedly limited in scope, the
experience taught her the joys of an actual readership.
She attended Tufts University, majoring in English and minoring in Latin
American studies. Hester spent a year abroad studying at University
College London, where she fell in love with geeky courses in phonology
and English syntax and grammar, despite her British phonology professor
forever mocking her for pronouncing the “r” in her own name.
Eager to escape the harsh winters of her native New England, she moved to
Tucson after college. By day, she worked as a preschool teacher in a
bilingual Headstart classroom; by night, she served as a relay operator
for the deaf. She eventually left the Arizona desert to attend the
University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. Although her two years on the island of
Oahu did produce a Masters degree in English, she remembers them mainly
as time spent scuba-diving, singing karaoke with her Japanese roommate,
and failing, in spectacular fashion, to surf. (Her ill-fated surfing
attempt and its resulting scars surprised no one, given Hester’s
lifelong struggle to operate in three-dimensional space.) She also wrote a lot of fiction, with windows open and geckos singing to her from the
folds of the curtains.
Following graduation, Hester returned to the east coast and began a five-year
stint in southern New Hampshire as a high school English teacher. From
her adventures teaching teenagers the art of fiction writing, she
learned more than in all her previous years of higher ed. She currently
resides in New Jersey with her husband and two young children, writing
full-time whenever her children are not home sick or snow-bound or on
school vacation or a holiday, i.e. not nearly enough. Hester spends
November to February of each year wondering why she ever left Hawai’i.
