James Patterson is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of many books, including the blockbuster series MAXIMUM RIDE. More than 100 million of his books are in print around the world, making him one of the top-selling writers of all time.

Shan Serafin was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and raised in northern and southern California. During an extremely varied career, he has worked as a story developer and a dialogue sweetener for both film and television, including work for ABC-TV, Disney, BBC, Imagination Arts, HBO, and Sawai, Inc. He has written six episodes of a television documentary on adolescent issues. He has written and directed several plays, including ?The Essential Bond, ? which dramatizes the life of famed chemist Linus Pauling, the only person to win two unshared Nobel Prizes?one for chemistry, the other for peace. Prior to his career in writing, he taught high school English, history, and math for several years in Los Angeles. Prior to that, he served as a college admissions counselor at UCLA, his alma mater, where he obtained an undergraduate degree in English and math. He was a national leader for the teenage division of Soka Gakkai International-USA as well as editor of its national youth gazette, Seize the Day, and frequent contributor to its newspaper, World Tribune. Seventeen is his first novel, which he wrote, in part, because of a dearth of similar stories for the high school audience. He is currently working on his second, tentatively titled Conquest. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.