Official Bio

Jillian Cantor has a BA in English from Penn State University. She received her MFA from The University of Arizona and was the recipient of the national Jacob K. Javits fellowship. Her first novel, THE SEPTEMBER SISTERS, was nominated as a YALSA Best Book For Young Adults and for the Rhode Island Teen Book Award. Her second young adult novel, THE LIFE OF GLASS, is a nominee for the Grand Canyon Reader Award and winner of the 2011 Judy Goddard/Libraries, Ltd. Award, given by the Arizona Library Association. Her debut novel for adults, THE TRANSFORMATION OF THINGS, was released last winter and chosen as a Target Emerging Authors pick and a featured alternate in The Doubleday Book Club. She currently lives in Arizona with her husband and two sons.

Unofficial Bio

I grew up in suburban Philadelphia in Bucks County, PA, the oldest of two girls. Much of my childhood was filled with turbulent fights with my younger sister and sleepovers with my best friend in which we’d write plays and then act them out and talk about the future when I planned on being a writer and my best friend planned on being an actor and where we’d live in matching next-door beach houses. We’re still waiting on the beach houses, but here I am writing, and my best friend is still my best friend and acting. (Check out her very cool website here.)

In high school I played three musical instruments and spent most of my time practicing them and playing in various groups, one of which I met my future husband in. I always liked reading and writing but thought I’d probably have a career in something musical or science oriented until I had an amazing AP English teacher in 12th grade who convinced me otherwise.

I went to college at Penn State, where I majored in English and took my first creative writing class (loved) and had my first journalism job (hated). A few years later my sister went to Penn State, too, and when I was a senior and she was a freshman, we became friends for the first time, nearly shocking our parents to death when we called to tell them we hung out together just for fun. Though we are now still friends, I remain emotionally scarred from our childhood battles – the remnants of which always seem to make their way into my novels in some form.

After college I got married and I dragged my husband across the country so I could attend graduate school at The University of Arizona to get my MFA in creative writing. While there, I wrote a novel that would later get rejected by so many agents, I would lose count, and now that novel currently resides on a high shelf in my closet.

After graduate school I taught some writing classes at The University of Arizona and at a community college in Tucson for a few years. In that time I wrote another novel (what would later become my first novel, The September Sisters) and sent it out to a lot of agents, only to get rejected again. I decided I might never be able to be a “real” writer, so I stuck that book in a drawer, and even took a class and got my real estate license.

But in the summer of 2006, I suddenly realized how much I missed writing. I took that second book out, dusted it off, and started working on it again. In the fall of 2006, I sent it out to some more agents, and that was when the amazing Jessica Regel at the Jean V. Naggar Literary Agency read the manuscript and said she wanted to represent me!

After much more rejection, revision, and serious dedication on the part of my agent, the book sold in a two-book deal as a young adult book – a genre I knew very little about at the time. It was released as The September Sisters in February 2009 by Harperteen, as I scrambled to read lots of young adult books and learn about the genre before writing my second book, The Life of Glass, which was released in February 2010 by Harperteen.

As much as I loved reliving my teenage angst and writing for young adults, I missed writing stories about women, and so I began to focus my energy on writing books for adults. My very first commercial women’s fiction novel, The Transformation of Things, sold to Avon in May 2009 and will be released on November 2, 2010.

In the meantime, I’ve also acquired four cats and two kids and a house that is generally in some state of disarray, which I tell myself is because writing is more important than cleaning. I spend my time these days writing and chasing after my kids (not necessarily in that order).