Amelia Holt Atwater-Rhodes (born April 16, 1984), known professionally as Amelia Atwater-Rhodes, is an American author of fantasy and young adult literature and a Language Arts/Literature teacher at Learning Prep School in West Newton, MA.
She was born in Silver Spring, Maryland and has lived most of her life in Concord, Massachusetts. Her debut novel, In the Forests of the Night, was published in 1999, when she was fourteen years old. She has moved from her family's Sudbury home to a nearby Massachusetts town.
1999–2002: The Den of Shadows Quartet
Atwater was born in 1984 to Susan Atwater-Rhodes, a vice principal of Acton-Boxborough Regional High School.
Atwater-Rhodes wrote her first novel at the age of thirteen, which earned her the title of "teen successor to Anne Rice." At the time, she said she had over a dozen stories in various stages sitting on her shelves.
In middle school, Atwater-Rhodes was questioned by an English teacher when a girl she knew proceeded to brag that Atwater-Rhodes was trying to get a book published. As it turns out, the English teacher was also a literary agent and asked to read some of her work. This teacher later represented Atwater-Rhodes.
She began writing her first novel, In the Forests of the Night, under the working title White Wine. On May 11, 1997, after her best friend, Jessica, had picked the William Blake poem, "The Tiger", the book's final title was derived. The first draft of the novel was completed in August of that year. During the writing process, Atwater-Rhodes suffered from a case of writer's block and a computer virus crashed her computer. Atwater-Rhodes spent the next four months revising the novel before she submitted the manuscript on December 31.
In mid-February 1998, Atwater-Rhodes met her agent, Tom Hart, and he would go on to contact her to announce that Random House had accepted her manuscript for publication. Hart also stated that it would be published on April 14, 1998, her fourteenth birthday. The novel, however, was not published until May 11, 1999, two years after she began working on the manuscript. The novel was written in first-person narrative, a feat she did not repeat in the three later novels. Hart stated that the novel was "the fastest sale [he] ever had."
In the Forests of the Night was a huge success, gaining the attention of millions of young readers. Atwater-Rhodes spent the year making appearances in magazines and on talk shows, including The Rosie O'Donnell Show. The novel was praised highly by critics such as Publishers Weekly who called it "Insightful...and imaginative". Also during the year Atwater-Rhodes was working on the follow-up to Forests called Demon in My View which was under the then working title Bitter Life. It was published in May 2000. The novel was well received by critics and was made an ALA Quick Pick for Young Adults.
Atwater-Rhodes graduated Concord-Carlisle High in 2001, a year early because she completed her junior and senior years simultaneously. In September 2001, she released her third novel, Shattered Mirror and in May 2002 she released her fourth novel, Midnight Predator. Both novels were made an ALA Quick Pick.
2003–2007: The Kiesha'ra Series
In 2003, Atwater-Rhodes, who so far had published novels about vampires, took a change of course and began a series of books based on a world of shapeshifters that Atwater-Rhodes would call The Kiesha'ra Series. All the novels in the series are told in first-person narrative, a feat she had not done since her first novel. The first volume in the set of novels was released in July 2003, titled Hawksong. Despite the change in the subject topic the book was just as successful as her previous novels being made an ALA Quick Pick, it also won the School Library Journal Best Book of the Year, and was selected by Voice of Youth Advocates for their "Best Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror". Hawksong tells the story of a young woman named Danica Shardae, who is a princess and hawk shapeshifter of the Avian court, who also narrates the story. She tells of how all she has known all her life is war and all that she wants is to put an end to it.
The second novel in The Kiesha'ra Series, Snakecharm was released in September 2004. The novel is told by Danica's husband, Zane Cobriana, and continues where Hawksong left off. The third novel in the series, Falcondance was released in September 2005 and is told by Nicias Silvermead. The story takes place nineteen years after the events of Snakecharm.