Diana Peterfreund was born in Pennsylvania, but lived in Tampa Bay, Florida, for most of her life. Possessed by some odd compulsion, she thought it would be fun to attend university in someplace cold and gray rather than the sunny paradise in which she’d been raised. She picked New Haven, Connecticut and Yale. At school, Diana spent a year studying the Western Canon in an intense program called “Directed Studies,” then promptly escaped into hard science by declaring herself a Geology major. The liberal arts won her back, however, and she wound up double majoring in Geology and Literature (so she could, as her dad said, write about rocks). In her spare time, she sang soprano in a pop a capella group called Out of the Blue and worked as a costume designer for everything from a children’s theater musical production of James and the Giant Peach to an adults-only staging of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. She was also on the staff of the infamous campus tabloid, The Rumpus.

After graduation, she moved to New York City… on September 11, 2001. Job prospects weren’t great. A few months later, Diana was lucky enough to snag some regular gigs for an alternative newspaper in her home town, and returned to sunny Florida, where she worked a variety of jobs for said paper, from reviewing movies even the staff critic wouldn’t attend (she screened Glitter; let us never speak of it) to writing website reviews and posing as a half-naked beach bunny on the cover of the food guide. Eventually, they made her a staff editor and food critic in their Sarasota offices.

In 2003, Diana and her partner in crime, Sailor Boy, took one of those twenty-something sojourns to the great continent of Oceania. For a variety of reasons still shrouded in mystery, she left her steady job and proceeded to wander around Australia and New Zealand, where they explored the Great Barrier Reef, the Outback, glowworm-infested limestone caves, active volcanoes, lava tubes, and other natural wonders to delight her geologist’s heart. Less than a week after returning to Florida, Diana got a job as a food critic for the alternative newspaper, The Weekly Planet. She also had killer calves from all that hiking.

Fall of 2004 saw Diana’s home state of Florida rocked with hurricanes, and she and Sailor Boy took jobs with a FEMA contractor and worked in cleanup for a few months. After witnessing the wisdom of escaping Florida before the storms hit, they moved to D.C. in 2005, where he started law school and she got a job with a scientific journal. Her first cover appeared that summer: Secrets Volume 13, and three more would be published within a few months of each other.

In April 2005, Diana sold her first book, and in 2006, she started writing novels full time. Her first book Secret Society Girl, was released in the summer of 2006, and was named to the New York Public Library’s Best Books for the Teen Age list.

Other than writing, Diana’s interests include the outdoors, knitting and crocheting, old movies (especially by Hitchcock or starring Humphrey Bogart, Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart or Bing Crosby), cooking, eating out at restaurants, word origins (yes, she knows she’s a geek), playing World of Warcraft with her fiancé, taking advantage of all the free museums in D.C., endlessly dissecting her favorite television shows, reading, reading, and reading. She also loves Netflix, Panda-Cam, and blogging. Her blog is called Diana’s Diversions, and, unlike this bio, it’s written in first person.

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