[close] Lisa Lutz grew up in Southern California. After graduating high school, she attended UC Santa Cruz, UC Irvine, University of Leeds in England and San Francisco State University, although she still does not have a bachelor's degree.

Lisa spent most of the 1990s hopping from a string of low-paying odd jobs while writing and rewriting a mob comedy called Plan B. After it was made in 2000, Lisa vowed she would never write another screenplay. She began working on The Spellman Files in January of 2004. In the fall of that year, she drove across the country and moved into a 200-year-old house in the town of Westernville, New York (pop. 300). It was there Lisa shoveled snow and wrote the bulk of her first novel.

After her months in Westernville, Lisa returned to the west coast—and moved from Los Angeles to San Francisco to Seattle where she stayed for a while to write Curse of the Spellmans. She's recently returned to San Francisco and has promised her friends and family that they won't have to update her entry in their address books again for a long while. She is also the author of Revenge of the Spellmans and the upcoming The Spellmans Strike Again. [close]