Laura J. Burns only vaguely remembers her childhood on Long Island, NY. (That's the correct way to say it, BTW--on Long Island. You'll hear people say "in Long Island," but that just proves they're not from Long Island.)  She went to school near a lake that bore an Indian curse, was a cabana girl at a beach on Fire Island, and worked in a multiplex.

She moved to Manhattan to attend Barnard College, and stayed there until she'd entirely forgotten how to be a suburbanite. (Stayed in NYC, that is. Not at Barnard. College only lasts for four years, you know.) While in New York, Laura was a book editor, working on series like Goosebumps, Sweet Valley High, Fear Street, Thoroughbred, and Roswell High.

Laura met Melinda Metz at work, where they bonded while trudging up and down the stairs between their offices (in a really gorgeous pre-war building in the Flatiron district, with wide marble steps and fancy carved banisters. Best stairwell ever.) They worked on many Fear Street books together and discovered their mutual love of supernatural creatures and TV.  So when Laura moved on to another company and was developing a series about aliens in high school, it was pretty obvious to her who should write it. The Roswell High books were easy to edit, because by then she and Melinda had basically only one brain between them.

After Roswell High was turned into the late, great TV series Roswell, Laura and Melinda moved to Los Angeles to work as writers on the show. They also wrote a couple of pilots and were staff writers on the show 1-800-Missing (which was also based on a supernatural-themed YA book, but this time not one they wrote.)

Laura has written more than thirty books for kids and teens, and estimates that 85% of them involve the supernatural in some way. Sadly, in life, she has never met a vampire or a werewolf or even a run-of-the-mill ghost. (Her husband, annoyingly, can feel exactly where the ghost is in every supposedly haunted house they enter. It's very unfair.)

She now lives in New York again, and really misses the California weather. Along the way, she has acquired a husband, three kids, and way too many dogs and cats.