The skies they were ashen and sober;
The leaves they were crisped and sere –
The leaves they were withering and sere...
Anna Abed
Short Biography
Anna Abed (she/her) spent her childhood in France, which not only sparked her lifelong obsession with French history but also left her with an encyclopedic knowledge of pastries that she’s determined to put to good use in her stories. She holds a Ph.D. in chemistry and lives in Portland, Oregon.
Long Biography
Anna Abed (she/her) got her first taste of storytelling from her grandmother, an Iraqi-Jewish woman who understood that in Iraqi tradition, the story itself is only the skeleton—the real flesh and blood is in the telling. It's no coincidence that in A Thousand and One Nights, the hero isn't a warrior but a storyteller. A young woman named Scheherazade who must spin a new tale each night to survive until dawn. It was the first lesson Anna ever learned: a well-told story can hold even death at the door.
Anna spent her childhood in France, which gave her a lifelong obsession with French history and the strong opinion that no fictional world is complete until you know what the characters are eating.
She holds a Ph.D. in computational chemistry, where she studied non-equilibrium thermodynamics in open quantum systems. (Which is to say, she spent years modeling systems that refuse to settle into balance. Fitting training, perhaps, for writing fantasy worlds where nothing stays settled for long either.)
She lives in Portland, Oregon, where the rain provides a convenient excuse to stay indoors and write.
For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams...