Margaret Stohl is a graduate of Amherst College, where she won the Knox Prize for English Literature. She also received a master's degree in English from Stanford University, completed coursework for a doctorate in American studies at Yale University, was a teaching assistant in Romantic Poetry at Stanford and in Film Studies at Yale, and attended the Creative Writing program of the University of East Anglia. She is a veteran of the video-game industry, and after working with Activision and Westwood, she cofounded 7 Studios with her husband. She is the co-author of the Beautiful Creatures series with Kami Garcia. She is also the author of Icons, which is the first book in the Icons series.