Photographed somewhere in the 1800s....

Kristen Sheley

Kristen Sheley was born in January 1979 and grew up in Beaverton, Oregon, the oldest of two children. As a young girl, her interests lay in the creative arts, which provided an outlet to her overly vivid imagination, and in reading obnoxious amounts of books. At the age of nine she discovered the fun of writing her own stories, and boasted to her parents out of the blue that she would write a novel. Somehow, they kept a straight face. By the time she was fourteen, she had finished her first novel-length story, completely oblivious that this was rather abnormal for someone of her age.

Kristen opted to attend high school at the then-experimental Arts & Communications High School, established in 1992 as a magnet school for students with interests and talents in creative and written arts. Her creative writing teachers there would laugh when she asked if there were limitations to the final portfolios every term...and then pale when she would plop down a hundred pages worth of writing for that class.

Her love of writing continued and grew during these years, and after graduation she attended the University of Oregon with the goal of getting a degree in journalism and perhaps being an entertainment beat reporter. But by the time she graduated from the UO in 2002, with a BS in magazine journalism, Kristen realized she was too shy and intimidated to interview strangers. After a bit of soul searching, she decided to follow up her old dream of being a teacher and, in June 2003, earned her Masters of Arts in Teaching for high school language arts from Pacific University. After seven years working in California, she recently moved back to her hometown near Portland, Ore.

Kristen wrote the first "Partners in Time" book on and off between the ages of fifteen and twenty-one. The rest of the books in the series, she promises, won't take nearly as long to create, even around the demands of teaching. When she's not writing or teaching, she enjoys photography, history, research, traveling, reading magazines and novels, and movies -- especially the Back to the Future films. She can be reached by e-mail at:kristensheley@aol.com.