About the Author
Amy Reed was born and raised in and around Seattle, where she attended a total of eight schools by the time she was eighteen. Constant moving taught her to be restless and being an only child made her imagination do funny things. After a brief stint at Reed College (no relation), she moved to San Francisco and spent the next several years serving coffee and getting into trouble. She eventually graduated from film school, promptly decided she wanted nothing to do with filmmaking, returned to her original and impractical love of writing, and earned her MFA. After thirteen years in the San Francisco Bay Area, she now resides in the mountains of western North Carolina, where she edits and writes books, bakes bread, runs very slowly, tries to stay off the internet, and hangs out with her kid, who is already way cooler than she ever was.
Amy is the author of several books for young adults, including the novels BEAUTIFUL (2009), CLEAN (2011), CRAZY (2012), OVER YOU (2013), DAMAGED (2014), THE NOWHERE GIRLS (2017), THE BOY AND GIRL WHO BROKE THE WORLD (2019), and the nonfiction anthology OUR STORIES, OUR VOICES (2018), all with Simon & Schuster. Her two-book series, INVINCIBLE (2015) and UNFORGIVABLE (2016) was published by Katherine Tegen/Harper Collins. TELL ME MY NAME, a gender-swapped, near-future retelling of The Great Gatsby, was published with Dial/Penguin Random House (2021).
Best known for writing critically acclaimed (and often banned) young adult novels, Amy also serves as editorial director at Otterpine, a boutique independent publishing services company based in Asheville, North Carolina. She was part of the writing team for Uncultured (St. Martin’s Press, 2022), the debut memoir by Daniella Mestyanek Young, and most recently co-authored The Culting of America: What Makes a Cult and Why We Love Them (Otterpine, 2026) with her. She is currently working on her first novel for adults.
