Julia Quinn is the pseudonym used by Julie Pottinger (born Julie Cotler in 1970), a best-selling American historical romance author. Pottinger grew up in the New England and California. She has appeared on the New York Times Bestseller List nine times. Pottinger went to Harvard and majored in Art History. After getting this degree, she decided that she wanted to be a doctor, so she had to complete two more years of college to fulfill her science credits. While studying science, she drafted two romance novels. A few weeks after she was accepted to medical school, she discovered that her first two novels, Splendid and Dancing At Midnight, had been sold at auction, so she postponed medical… school for two years while she wrote two more novels. By the time Pottinger finally entered Yale medical school, three of her books had been published. After only a few short months of studying medicine, however, she left medical school and devoted herself full-time to her writing. Pottinger lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband, Paul Pottinger. She was the recipient of the Romance Writers of America RITA Award in 2007 for "On the Way to the Wedding" and in 2008 for "The Secret Diaries of Miss Miranda Cheever".