Louise Hawes is the author of many novels for young adults and is also a faculty member of the Spalding University MFA in Writing program. She has always loved fairy tales and says that Black Pearls was written for “everyone who dances without looking at the clock.” She lives in North Carolina.
MARY SHARRATT is an American writer who has lived in the Pendle region of Lancashire, England, for the past seven years. The author of the critically acclaimed novels Summit Avenue , The Real Minerva , and The Vanishing Point , Sharratt is also the coeditor of the subversive fiction anthology Bitch Lit , a celebration of female antiheroes, strong women who break all the rules.