Maria Dahvana Headley is the author of the novel Queen of Kings (Dutton, 2011), a pitch-dark historical fantasy filled with classical monsters, serpents, Thessalian and displaced Norse witches, gods, ghosts, the Roman Army, Faustian bargains, and Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt. Also, um, a lot of horror and blood. Queen is the first book in what will no doubt be a gigantic, fun-to-read-yet-difficult-to-market-due-to-hybrid-genre trilogy. Previously, Maria wrote The Year of Yes, a memoir of the year she went out with anyone in New York City who asked. Just to make an already bewilderingly diverse career more confusing, she's also been anthologized with a variety of erotica pieces, written randomly while procrastinating other things. Those appear in places like Best American Erotica, and in Dirty Words: A Literary Encyclopedia of Sex, where she wrote the essay on Climax. Of course. She is obsessed with monsters of all shapes and sizes, libraries, lost works, stolen souls, tattoos, and Herodotus. All this is to say: she is a Gemini. She lives in Seattle, but she grew up in the remote high desert of Idaho, on a catastrophically unsuccessful sled dog ranch. www.cleopatraqueenofkings.com