Lauren Myracle is the author of squillions of books for tweens and teens, including the best-selling Internet Girls series, horror novels Bliss and Rhymes with Witches, the coming-of-age series, The Winnie Years, and Shine, winner of the 2012 Walden Award for YA fiction. Lauren considers writing for young people to be her life’s work, and with over a million copies of her books in print, she feels amazingly lucky to be able to reach such a large audience. Her realistic portrayal of the issues middle school and high school students deal with, however, brings Lauren negative attention as well as positive. Her novel ttyl was one of the top ten most frequently challenged books of 2007, and Lauren herself was one of the top ten most frequently challenged authors of the same year. But Lauren prefers to focus on the positive. She takes great pleasure in the response of her fans, who call her books "awesome" and "soooooo good," and she cites the following as her favorite compliment ever: "I can't believe it was written by a--cough, cough--grown-up!"