Photo by Emma L. Young Photography

Sarah Jean Horwitz was raised in suburban New Jersey, where she lived next door to a cemetery and down the street from an abandoned fairy tale theme park, which probably explains a lot. Her love of storytelling grew from listening to her mother’s original “fractured” fairy tales, a childhood spent in community theater, and far too many rereads of Harry Potter and Anne of Green Gables. 

​Sarah Jean was a film production student at Emerson College when she took her first screenwriting class and realized that making up a movie’s story was a lot more fun than actually making it happen, and also that cameras are really heavy. She graduated with a B.A. in Visual & Media Arts and a concentration in writing for film and television in 2012.
 
Naturally, the first project she decided to write after graduating film school was a book. A few years, a handful of continental U.S. states, and many odd jobs later, that book became THE WINGSNATCHERS, the first book in the Carmer and Grit series. THE WINGSNATCHERS was a Kids Indie Next List pick and a Junior Library Guild Selection. Sarah Jean's most recent novel is the standalone middle grade fantasy THE DARK LORD CLEMENTINE, which was an Amazon.com Best Book of the Month and received favorable reviews from the New York Times Book Review, School Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and more. Her next fantasy for young readers, THE DEMON SWORD ASPERIDES, will be released on July 11, 2023.

Sarah Jean currently works in academic administration and lives with her spouse near Cambridge, MA. Her work is represented by Victoria Marini of the Irene Goodman Agency.