Cassandra Rose Clarke

---

Cassandra Rose Clarke’s first adult novel, The Mad Scientist’s Daughter, was a finalist for the 2013 Philip K. Dick Award, and her YA novel, The Assassin’s Curse, was nominated for YALSA’s 2014 Best Fiction for Young Adults. Her short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons and Daily Science Fiction. Her latest novel is Our Lady of the Ice, forthcoming from Saga Press in 2015.

Cassandra graduated in 2006 from The University of St. Thomas with a B.A. in English, and two years later she completed her master’s degree in creative writing at The University of Texas at Austin. In 2010 she attended the Clarion West Writer’s Workshop in Seattle, where she was a recipient of the Susan C. Petrey Clarion Scholarship Fund. She currently teaches composition and rhetoric at a pair of local Houston colleges.

Author's Comment: I love strangeness in writing. This has been true every since I was kid—for example, I HATED Scooby Doo because the strangeness always turned out to be totally mundane. Even when I’m reading literary fiction or realist fiction, I tend toward stories that have an element of strangeness to them, or quirkiness, or hyper-reality. Because strangeness is such an embedded element of fantasy and science fiction, it’s makes sense that they are the genres I’m most drawn to.

Nationality: American