Susan Dennard

Susan Dennard (born February 25, 1984) is an American New York Times bestselling author. Her debut novel, Something Strange and Deadly, was published in 2012 by HarperCollins.

Susan Dennard was born on February 25, 1984 in Georgia. She originally planned to major in English at University of Georgia, but was "sidetracked by science" and completed Bachelor's degrees in Fisheries and Statistics instead, and then completed her Master’s in Marine Biology at the Great Lakes Institute for Environmental Research in Windsor, Ontario, with the intention of solving the problem of overfishing. This work has led her to six of the seven continents, of which Asia is still missing.

In 2009, she chose to forego completing a PhD and joined her now husband in Europe. She then focused on writing for publication, and her debut novel Something Strange and Deadly was released July 24, 2012. The trilogy was completed in the next two years, with A Darkness Strange and Lovely on July 23, 2013, and Strange and Ever After on July 22, 2014. A Dawn Most Wicked, a prequel novella to the series, was published shortly before the second in the series on June 4, 2013.

The Something Strange and Deadly series is set in Philadelphia in the late 1800s, with a Dead army plaguing the city. Eleanor Fitt is 16 years old and lives in Philadelphia at the time of the first American World Fair in 1876, when a zombie attack delivers her a message that her brother has been taken hostage. She takes on the quest to get him back, enlisting the aid of the city’s outcasted supernatural defense force, called Spirit-Hunters. A Darkness Strange and Lovely continues the story as Eleanor escapes to Paris, only to find that it also has been overrun with the Dead. She must dig deeper into the dark secrets of the city and magic to keep her Spirit-Hunter friends and herself alive. Strange and Ever After ends the series in nineteenth century Egypt, to where she tracks her kidnapped friend, taken by an evil necromancer, and uses her power and friends trust to pay the price that will end the darkness once and for all. The prequel, A Dawn Most Wicked, tells the story of Daniel, a future member of the Spirit-Hunters, before the troubles of Philadelphia, and how the Spirit-Hunters began. He gets a new beginning working on a boat, where he meets Jie and Joseph, who become his Spirit-Hunter teammates, and Cassidy, the boat's apprentice pilot. Ghosts give the crew horrible nightmares and threaten to put the boat out of business, and Daniel must find the cause and destroy the evil behind it to save the boat and his friends.

Her next book, Truthwitch, was bought by Tor Books and released on January 5, 2016. It debuted at #4 on the New York Times best seller list. It takes place in a fantasy world controlled by three empires, where some people have a special kind of magic, called witchery. Safiya, a truthwitch with the unique power to discern truth from lies, and her best friend Iseult, a threadwitch who can sense the ties between other people, become caught up in a conspiracy between the empires. They take on the aid of Prince Merik, an admiral with the power to control wind, in hopes of avoiding the danger coming between the empires, while trying to elude the search of Aeduan, a bloodwitch sellsword trained as a Carawen monk. The story follows these four characters as they try to find their paths and stay alive.

The second book in the Witchlands series is forecast to publish in Winter of 2017. The cover for Windwitch was released online through Entertainment Weekly on May 3, 2016, along with an excerpt. Truthwitch is scheduled for release in German under the title Schwestern der Wahrheit on August 22, 2016, with an alternate cover style.

Susan also runs a blog and newsletter (Misfits & Daydreamers) offering tips for helping aspiring authors write novels, find agents, and earn publishing deals. The guide articles involve steps for planning a novel, the revising process, the steps to expect when querying for an agent, and working with that agent to sell the book.

Susan currently lives in the Midwestern US with her husband, two dogs named Asimov and Princess Leia, and two cats. She enjoys taking her dogs for walks, practicing karate, playing video games, and reading. She is also a cookie enthusiast.