Jean Marie Ward

When Jean Marie Ward started writing fiction is open to debate. She points to the play about the theft of Thor's hammer she bullied her third grade class into producing. (Yes, she played Loki. You had to ask?) Others claim she didn't become a professional liar until she started writing, editing and committing public relations for the federal government.

And like her third grade role model, Jean Marie believes in working both sides of the mike, preferably against the middle. She has served as chief public affairs officer for a major Defense Department agency and associate producer for the long-running, local-access cable TV show Mystery Readers Corner. She's written news and feature articles for newspapers, magazines and SciFi.com, and edited the respected web magazine Crescent Blues for eight years.

With Nine You Get Vanyr, the fantasy novel she wrote with Teri Smith, will be released by Samhain Publishing in spring 2007. She is also the author of Illumina: The Art of J.P. Targete (Paper Tiger). Her short mystery, "Most Dead Bodies In a Confined Space", can be found in the Prime Books anthology Strange Pleasures 2. Her flash fiction "First Stone" appears in Prime Books' Strange Pleasures 3.