Steven Decker is the author of many novels, including the bestselling Time Chain series and Child of Another Kind. His love of writing was born on the day he threw a spitball at one of his 5th-grade classmates. Rather than punish him, his wise old teacher, Mrs. Brewer, called Steven to the front of the class and handed him a book of poetry. She quietly instructed him to memorize “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” by Robert Frost and informed him that he would be reciting the poem in front of the class the following day. Mrs. Brewer hit a home run.

Inspired by Frost’s ability to paint a picture and generate deep emotion with the written word, Steven fell in love with reading, writing, and storytelling. As an 8th grader, he read the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, for fun. It wasn’t a homework assignment. As a student at the University of Virginia, he was thrilled at the prospect of writing a thesis as the culmination of his undergraduate studies. While traveling the world for work, Steven kept writing, and his experiences around the globe have influenced his novels in many ways.

When living in Appalachia while writing his first novel, Steven studied and practiced the art of storytelling. Since that time, he always edits his books by reading them aloud to himself. Novels are a story and need to sound like one. Fiction readers want to escape from their everyday lives when they read a novel. Thus the true job of a novelist is to imagine special things, sometimes even spectacular things, then write about them in a way that inspires the reader to go there, too, leaving the ordinary behind.

Steven Decker lives and writes in a small town in Connecticut, although he spends a lot of time in other parts of the world, and sometimes those places appear in his books. In addition to writing, he enjoys time with his family and his dogs and taking long walks in the countryside.