Novelist Jodi Picoult makes her home in Hanover, New Hampshire. Picoult, who was awarded the New England Bookseller Award for fiction in 2003, has written over a dozen novels since 1992. She was born in 1966 and raised in Nesconset on Long Island, New York. Her very first story, titled "The Lobster Which Misunderstood" was written when she was only 5 years old.
Picoult attended Princeton University and had two short stories published in Seventeen Magazine while she was a creative writing student at the prestigious school. Her mentor was a teacher at the university, Mary Morris. After Princeton, she took a series of jobs - as a technical writer for a Wall Street brokerage firm, a copywriter at an ad agency, and and as a middle school English teacher - before heading to Harvard to pursue a master's degree in education.
Her stories are inspired by her happy childhood and marriage, and her plots tend to revolve around relationships, love, and family. She wrote her first novel, Songs of the Humpback Whale, a book about love, loss and self-discovery, when she was pregnant with her first child. The book was published in 1992. Picoult seems to have drawn on her experience of becoming a mother in her second novel, Harvesting the Heart, which was published the following year.
In 1995, she released her third novel, Picture Perfect and followed it with Mercy, which became a selection of the Literary Guild and the Doubleday Book Club. A story about mercy killing, Mercy was named one of the top seven novels of the year by Glamour Magazine. In 2003, she received the Margaret Alexander Edwards Award by the American Library Association for her novel My Sister's Keeper.
Picoult often draws on her own experiences as a mother. But her environment inevitably creeps into her novels too. Her 2003 novel, Second Glance takes place in Vermont and is inspired by the Abenaki Indians that settled in this region. In 2006, Picoult wrote her fourteenth novel, Nineteen Minutes. The book is set in the small fictional town of Sterling, New Hampshire.
In early 2007, Picoult was asked by DC Comics to pen the Wonder Woman comic book series for five issues. Her first issue was released on March 28, 2007. Her latest novel, Change of Heart, will hit bookstores on March 4, 2008.
Books by Jodi Picoult:
Songs of the Humpback Whale, 1992
Harvesting the Heart, 1993
Picture Perfect, 1995
Mercy, 1996
The Pact, 1998
Keeping Faith, 1999
Plain Truth, 1999
Salem Falls, 2001
Perfect Match, 2002
Second Glance, 2003
My Sister's Keeper, 2004
Vanishing Acts, 2005
The Tenth Circle, 2006
Nineteen Minutes, 2007
Change of Heart, 2008
