Born and raised in Los Angeles, Cindy Lin is a former journalist with degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Before venturing into the wild world of fiction, she worked as a field producer in television news, a news writer, and an entertainment web producer, among other things.
She’s written and produced many multimedia news features for children, one of which received a Peabody Award. She’s also worked at Sony Pictures Entertainment, on Emmy-winning projects at Disney-ABC Television, chased breaking news stories for Nippon Television, and spent two years on the west coast of Japan teaching English for the JET Program, where she picked up Japanese from the 700 high school boys who were her students. (It wasn’t until much later that she was told, to her mortification, that her Japanese was full of teenage boy slang.)
There’s nothing she loves more than writing except for reading, and the proof is in the stacks of books that threaten to take over her house in Southern California, which she shares with two cats. A certified yoga instructor, Cindy has recently taken up archery and kendo (Japanese fencing) and loves the discipline of learning a martial art. She also likes to rock climb and dreams of doing a triathlon someday, if she can convince race organizers to let her wear floaties in the swim portion. She went through a comedy improv training program to help silence her inner critic, which didn’t quite work — but introduced her to a whole new world of saying “YES, AND…” whenever possible.