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Janet Ruth Young

Biography

Janet Ruth Young

Janet Ruth Young, who lives in Gloucester, Massachusetts, graduated from Salem State College and from the creative writing program at Boston University. She was a co-editor of the literary magazine stet and a founder of Writers' Circle, the writing workshop at the Cambridge Women's Center. Her travel articles and book and theater reviews have appeared in The Boston Globe and other local publications. She left her job as an editor at a publishing company to pursue a career as a novelist.

THE OPPOSITE OF MUSIC, published in 2007 by Atheneum Books for Young Readers, a division of Simon & Schuster, garnered enthusiastic reviews from Booklist, School Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, The Denver Post, The Boston Globe, The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, and the website TeensReadToo. It won the PEN New England Discovery Award and was a Book Sense Pick, a Borders Original Voices selection, and an American Library Association Best Books for Young Adults nominee.

Janet's second novel, THE BABYSITTER MURDERS, about a babysitter who has thoughts of harming the child she cares for (Atheneum, 2011), received a starred review in Publishers Weekly.

Janet has given talks and workshops for the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance, the local chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, the Massachusetts Library Association, the Marblehead Festival of the Arts, the cable TV program The Writer's Block with John Ronan. She would love to hear from readers or to arrange a visit to your book group, school, bookstore, or library.

Janet Ruth Young