Julia Quinn started writing her first book one month after finishing college and has been tapping away at her keyboard ever since. The New York Times bestselling author of sixteen novels for Avon Books, she is a graduate of Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges and lives with her family in the Pacific Northwest. A native and current resident of Southern California, Suzanne Enoch loves movies almost as much as she loves books. She once appeared on an E! special, Star Wars Is Back, as an expert on the romance in the Star Wars movies. Other highlights include winning her third grade spelling bee, receiving an E.T. poster and T-shirt in an alien-inspired poetry contest, and submitting a script for The A-Team (which was not why the series was cancelled). When she is not busily working on her next novel, Suzanne likes to contemplate interesting phenomena, like how the three guppies in her aquarium became 161 guppies in five months. Karen Hawkins was raised in Tennessee, a member of a huge extended family that included her brother and sister, an adopted sister, numerous foster siblings and various exchange students. In order to escape the chaos (and whilst hiding when it was her turn to do the dishes), she would huddle under the comforter on her bed with a flashlight and a book, a habit she still embraces to this day. For more information about Karen, or pictures of her chasing a box of donuts while training for a road race, visit her at www.karenhawkins.com or write to her at Karen Hawkins, P.O. Box 5292, Kingsport, TN 37663-5292. When not carpooling, scraping gum off seatbelts, doing laundry and staring insanity in the face, Mia Ryan likes to escape into her writing. You can also read Mia Ryan's "A Dozen Kisses" in The Further Observations of Lady Whistledown, an Avon book published in February 2003.