Cristina Negrón
Cristina Negrón, series creator, has finished fourteen marathons (running) and four Moby Dick marathons (reading). The latter left her with fewer blisters but more paper cuts. A career editor and writer, she spent most of her professional life as a senior editor for Runner’s World magazine, the rest as a free-lance copy editor for various book and magazine publishers.
A literature major in college, Cristina was vacationing on the Yucatan Peninsula when she first heard the Mayan prediction about the world ending on December 12, 2012. Her immediate reaction: “Oh my god! I haven’t read Moby Dick!” That’s when she dove into Melville’s masterpiece and began writing the first book in The Classics Slacker series.
Cristina lives in Connecticut with her husband, the wondrous Amby Burfoot, who doesn’t laugh at her jokes, and the world’s cutest rescue dog, Beto, who does.
“Brevity is the soul of wit.” —Hamlet (2.2)
Deb Martin
To the refined discipline of literary satire, Deb Martin brings all the skills of a conventionally trained garden writer. Before her involvement with The Classics Slacker series, Deb was more likely to be found writing about organic gardening, wild bird feeding, and composting. With Barbara Pleasant, she is the coauthor of The Complete Compost Gardening Guide (Storey Publishing, 2008).
She is beyond delighted for the chance at last to dig into the great works of literature with their often-stupefying verbiage, perfectly ripe for mockery.
A graduate of Purdue University, Deb grows pawpaws, manages a farmers market, and cheers for the Boilermakers from her Pennsylvania home, which she shares with her husband, Bob, and their cats, Cass and Hamilton.
“It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”—Macbeth (5.5)
Heidi Mastrogiovanni
A dedicated animal welfare advocate, Heidi Mastrogiovanni is a graduate of Wesleyan University and an uncompromising champion of the Oxford comma. Heidi is the author of the comedic novel Lala Pettibone’s Act Two (finalist, Foreword Reviews Book of the Year) and the sequel Lala Pettibone: Standing Room Only. She is a contributor to the Washington Independent Review of Books, a member of the Writers Guild of America, and is the coambassador for the Los Angeles chapter of the Authors Guild.
Heidi is fluent in German and French, though she doesn’t countenance both those languages needing more than one definite article. She lives in Los Angeles with her musician husband and their rescued senior dogs. Heidi loves to read, hike, travel, and do a classic spit-take when something is really funny.
“A jest’s prosperity lies in the ear of him that hears it.”—Love’s Labour’s Lost (5.2)