Ann Brashares

Ann Brashares has won millions of fans with her blockbuster series Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants in which she so powerfully captured the emotional complexities of female friendship.

As an undergraduate, Brashares studied philosophy at Barnard College. Expecting to continue her studies in graduate school, Ann took a year off after college to work as an editor, hoping to save money for school. Loving her job, she never looked back, remaining in New York City and working in various editorial jobs until she began her first novel, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, which became an international best seller.

Over the next five years she wrote three sequels-The Second Summer of the Sisterhood, Girls in Pants, and Forever in Blue. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants was made into a popular feature film and released by Warner Brothers in 2005, and the sequel, Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 was released in 2008. A companion book to the Sisterhood series, 3 Willows: The Sisterhood Grows, was published in 2009. Her first adult novel, The Last Summer (of You and Me) was released in 2007.

Her latest book, My Name is Memory was released in June 2010. The first in a planned trilogy, it is an adult romance novel that stretches across centuries and past lives, taking readers on a tour of romantic near-misses, from sixth-century Africa through eighth-century Turkey to WWI.

Says Brashares, "I don't really write with the idea of trying to teach any lessons. I want to tell a story as truthfully and engagingly as I can, and then let the chips fall where they may."