LITERATURE + LECTURES

Thursday, September 22 at 7:00pm, Blue Willow Bookshop presents Cynthia Leitich Smith. Cynthia Leitich Smith will discuss and sign her graphic novel for young adults, Tantalize: Kieran’s Story.

As a hybrid werewolf, Kieren is destined to join an urban Wolf pack and learn to master his shift. Soon, he’ll leave everything behind: home, school, his family, and Quincie, his human best friend . . . who’s beginning to be a whole lot more than a friend.  In an elegant graphic edition featuring cinematic sequential art by debut artist Ming Doyle and lush, romantic cover art by Sam Weber , bestselling author Cynthia Leitich Smith re-envisions her delicious dark fantasy through wolfish eyes.

In suburban Kansas City, she began as a child poet and grew into a journalist. She was the editor of my junior high and high school newspapers. She went on to study journalism at The University of Kansas and law at The University of Michigan Law School. Along the way, she had a ton of jobs. She worked as a popcorn popper at a movie theater, a cashier at a gas station, a waitress at a Mexican restaurant, a switchboard operator for a bank, a telemarketer, and a receptionist for a small law firm. She served as a reporting intern for various small-town papers and The Dallas Morning News as well as a marketing intern for a greeting-card company in Kansas City, an oil company in Oklahoma, and a non-profit organization in Topeka. She also held summer/semester clerkships at a judge's office in Kansas, a small women's rights firm in Michigan, and a legal aid in Hawaii.

After graduation, she moved to Chicago, where she worked briefly in the law office of the Department of Health and Human Services. But after six months (and a long talk with some ducks in Lake Michigan), she quit her day job to write full time. She eventually relocated and settled in Austin, where she lives with her husband and sometimes co-author, Greg Leitich Smith, and four dedicated writer cats.