Libby Sternberg/Libby Malin

Edgar-nominated Author

Libby Malin Sternberg was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland and is still in love with the city of crabcakes, steamy summers, and ethnic neighborhoods. (What’s not to love about a city that names its football team after an Edgar Allan Poe character?)

Baltimore is the setting of her debut contemporary women’s fiction book, Loves Me, Loves Me Not, her Bianca Balducci mystery series, and several as-yet-to-be-published historical novels set in the 1950s.

Libby earned both bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Peabody Conservatory of Music and also attended the summer American School of Music in Fontainebleau, France.

After graduating from Peabody, she worked as a Spanish gypsy, a Russian courtier, a Middle-Eastern slave, a Japanese Geisha, a Chinese peasant, and a French courtesan – that is, she sang as a union chorister in both Baltimore and Washington Operas, where she regularly had the thrill of walking through the stage doors of the Kennedy Center Opera House before being costumed and wigged for performance. She also sang with small opera and choral companies in the region.

Alas, singing didn’t pay all the bills so she turned to writing, working in a public relations office and then as a freelancer for various trade organizations and small newspapers.

During a period of self-unemployment, she took her sister’s advice and decided to pursue an unfulfilled dream – writing fiction. Her first young adult novel, Uncovering Sadie’s Secrets, was a nominee for the prestigious Edgar Allan Poe award from Mystery Writers of America. The second in that mystery series was released in hardcover in November 2004. A third mystery in the series will be released in 2008. All of her books have received critical acclaim.

For many years, she and her family lived in Vermont, where she worked as an education reform advocate, contributed occasional commentaries to Vermont Public Radio and was a member of the Vermont Commission on Women.

She is married, with three children, and now resides in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.