About Yael K. Miller

I have been interested in stories from a very young age, and as a child I frequented the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), where paintings that told stories held my interest.

At the University of Pennsylvania I majored in English with a Medieval/Renaissance concentration and minored in Classical Studies — I spent four years learning story. I was also a University Scholar during all four years, twice receiving research grant funds for my writing projects.

In May of 2004 I attended Penn-at-Cannes, watching 35 films in 12 days of the Cannes Film Festival before going on to Italy to see the Baroque church paintings I had studied in college.

In my senior year I won the 2004-2005 Penn Playwriting Fellowship, which earned a stipend and a week-long workshopping of my short play JULIET’S NURSE (an Ovidian retelling of Shakespeare’s ROMEO AND JULIET).

An earlier version of that play had won an invitation for me to the New South Young Playwrights Short Play Festival in Atlanta, Georgia, in the summer of 2003.

I got the idea for the HURRICANE HOODOO series when I temporarily worked as an assistant at a television production company that wanted ideas for children’s programming. When the company passed on my idea, I began developing it myself.

In October 2005, two years after Hurricane Katrina, I visited New Orleans for the first time. With a small video camera I recorded the places where my imaginary characters roamed. I also did extensive research into such areas as hoodoo, flooding in the New Orleans area, Marie Laveau, and Catholic Church rituals.

I’ve always been a book reader and I read a wide range of nonfiction and scifi/fantasy. For the last few years I’ve been drawn to the creativity of children’s fantasy novels, particularly Jenny Nimmo’s Charlie Bone series, Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series, and Garth Nix’s Keys to the Kingdom series.

My goal for the series HURRICANE HOODOO is to entertain while educating children on the compelling historical past and present of the city of New Orleans.

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