Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1969
• Raised—Adirondack Mountains of New York State, USA
• Education—B.A., Williams College; graduate studies, University of Wisconsin and Oxford
• Awards—PEN/Albrand Award, Veolia Prix du Livre Environnement, Beacon of Freedom Award
• Currently—lives in the English Cotswolds, UK
Amy Butler Greenfield was on her way to a history Ph.D. when she changed course to became a writer. She has written four young adult novels, including Virginia Bound (2003) and the Chantress trilogy (2013-2015). She has also written a work of historical nonfiction entitled A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire (2005).
Amy grew up in a small town the Adirondack Mountains of New York State. Her family lived in a old Victorian house heated mainly by a wood stove in the kitchen. They raised chickens in the barns off the backyard. Of her childhood, Amy recalls roaming with her friends through the mountains, swimming in nearby lakes in the summer, and skating on them in the winter.
I also spent many afternoons reading my heart out in our local Carnegie library. In the summer I wrote plays, and my brothers and friends performed them in a theater we rigged up in one of the barns. I also wrote stories and poems, and I was a passionate diary-keeper. I've loved books and writing as long as I can remember.
In addition to literature, Amy fell in love with history and decided she wanted to teach at the college level. She headed to Williams College for her B.A. and later to the University of Wisconsin-Madison for her Ph.D. She also became a Marshall Scholar at Oxford University where she studied Renaissance Europe, imperial Spain, and colonial Latin America.
A few months into her doctoral dissertation, Amy developed Lupus, which led to the revelation that she wanted devote her life to pursuing a long-deferred dream. So rather than complete her Ph.D., she turned to writing novels and "the sweeping histories" she had come to love.
Amy's first two books grew out of research while studying at Oxford. Virginia Bound was inspired by historical accounts she read of young English people who were essentially kidnapped and sent to the new world as indentured servants. Were they lonely? she wondered. Did they yearn for home and family? What happened to them?
Then, while in Spain researching the history of chocolate, a product introduced to Europe from the West Indies, Amy came across documents about another kind of product entirely—the red die that came from the cochineal, a tiny cactus parasite found in Mexico.
Gradually I realized that tons of cochineal had crossed the Atlantic and poured into Seville, where the dark red dye was unloaded on the city docks. I have a visual imagination, and I love color, so this fascinated me. It also amazed me that something so precious could have been forgotten by the modern world. I thought that someday I'd like to write a book about it.
More remarkably, the love of color and textile dyes is part of Amy's heritage. Her Scottish great-grandfather came to the U.S. where he studied dyes and worked in textiles. Eventually, he joined the faculty of Drexel University in Philadelphia as a professor of textile chemistry. His son, Amy's grandfather, worked for dye companies and married a woman who owned a yarn shop. Amy's mother also studied textiles and married a man who worked in physics and chemistry. Out of what would seem a genetic attraction to color came Amy's 2005 history, A Perfect Red.
Amy met her husband David while studying at Oxford. After living for a number of years outside of Boston, Massachusetts, the couple and their children now live on the edge of the Cotswolds in England. There Amy writes, reads, and bakes double-dark-chocolate cake.
She loves music, romantic adventure, history, quirky science, and suspense, which explains how she came to write her first YA novel, Chantress. (Author bio adapted from various web-based sources, including the author's website.)