Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

Chelsea Quinn Yarbro is a highly accomplished American author, with a career spanning over forty years. She has written successful novels in various genres, including science fiction, fantasy, horror, mystery, and thriller. Yarbro is best known for her Saint-Germain series, which is the longest-running vampire series in history.

Yarbro began her professional writing career in 1961, writing plays for a children's theater company. She later switched to writing stories and has since sold over eighty books, more than seventy works of short fiction, and over three dozen essays, introductions, and reviews. In addition to her writing, Yarbro also composes serious music.

Before becoming a full-time writer in 1970, Yarbro worked as a demographic cartographer, and still enjoys drafting maps for her books and for other writers. She has a large reference library with a wide range of subjects, including food, fashion, weapons, trade routes, religion, and law, which she continually updates as part of her ongoing fascination with history and culture. Yarbro is a skeptical occultist who has studied everything from alchemy to zoomancy and worked as a professional tarot card reader and palmist in the late 1970s.

Yarbro is a divorced woman who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her two cats, Butterscotch and Crumpet. She is a good cook and an experienced seamstress, and when not busy writing, she enjoys the symphony or opera. In 1997, the Transylvanian Society of Dracula bestowed a literary knighthood on Yarbro, and in 2003, the World Horror Association presented her with a Grand Master award. In 2006, the International Horror Guild enrolled her among their Living Legends, and in 2009, the Horror Writers Association gave her a Life Achievement Award. In 2014, she won a Life Achievement Award from the World Fantasy Convention. Yarbro's Saint-Germain series is a testament to her creativity and storytelling abilities, with books ranging widely over time and place, and published in order of publication, not in chronological order.