About Clare B. Dunkle

“Former librarian Clare B. Dunkle is a writer worth watching. Gifted with the ability to create unique historical fantasy novels with a narrative pull like a Hoover, she wins fanatically dedicated readers right and left.”
—Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books

I was born Clare Buckalew in Fort Worth, Texas, and grew up in Denton, Texas, a city north of Dallas. I earned my B.A. in Russian with a minor in Latin from Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. After graduating from Indiana University with a master’s degree in library science, I came back to San Antonio to work. I earned tenure as the monographs cataloger at Trinity University’s Coates Library from 1990 to 1999; then I left the library to homeschool my two daughters, Valerie and Elena. My family moved to Germany in 2000, and we lived for seven years in the Rheinland Pfalz region, not far from the old Roman city of Trier. We returned to San Antonio in the summer of 2007, when my younger daughter Elena graduated from high school and started college.

From April, 2001 to March, 2004, my daughters attended a German boarding school for girls, and I began to write books for them. They read my first four books as a series of letters from home.

Since then, I have written seven books:

• The Hollow Kingdom, published in 2003;
• Close Kin, published in 2004;
• By These Ten Bones, published in 2005;
• In the Coils of the Snake, published in 2005;
• The Sky Inside, published in 2008;
• The Walls Have Eyes, a sequel to The Sky Inside, which is scheduled for summer of 2009; and
• The House of Dead Maids (working title), a Wuthering Heights prequel which will probably be scheduled for early 2010.

At this relatively early point in my career, my books have sold over 60,000 copies and attracted the attention of critics as well as teens. The Hollow Kingdom won the Mythopoeic Award for Best Children’s Fantasy Book and earned a Publishers Weekly starred review and a Publisher’s Weekly “Flying Start” among other honors. Close Kin and By These Ten Bones both landed on the New York Public Library “Books for the Teen Age” lists, and By These Ten Bones made the shortlist for the Dorothy Canfield Fisher Children’s Book Award and the Mythopoeic Award as well. In the Coils of the Snake earned a starred review from Booklist and a place on the VOYA “Best Books for Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Horror” list. My latest book, The Sky Inside, earned a starred review from Booklist, and its jacket art landed on Booklist’s cover.

Three of my books have been named Bank Street College of Education Best Children’s Books. The three titles of The Hollow Kingdom Trilogy have been Junior Library Guild selections and have been scheduled for foreign language editions.

When I wrote The Hollow Kingdom, I had no agent and no fiction-publishing experience. I am deeply grateful that the manuscript found a home on its first trip out into the world and that Reka Simonsen, my editor at Holt, lavished such care on it. Reka and I worked happily together on The Hollow Kingdom Trilogy and By These Ten Bones. I loved my time at Holt. Leaving Reka was one of the hardest things I have done.

Ginee Seo of Atheneum (Simon & Schuster) acquired The Sky Inside and The House of Dead Maids for her own imprint of Ginee Seo Books and asked me to write The Walls Have Eyes for her. Working with someone of Ginee’s talent and experience is the sort of opportunity authors dream of. Writing for her scared me to death at first, but she does her work with disarming good humor, and her enthusiasm is contagious. I am blessed that such extraordinary people have interested themselves in my work.

Becoming an author has not diminished my love for my first career. I am proud to be a librarian. At Indiana University, passionate instructors imparted to me not just the technique but the joy of this vocation. Their teaching lives on in my work in a thousand ways. During my time at Trinity, I contributed articles on librarianship to the professional literature, including two published in The Journal of Academic Librarianship. I was a member of the American Library Association and served on committees in ALCTS, ACRL, and LITA. My ultimate dream is to return to ALA one day and enjoy the conference without the stress of being on a committee.