About the Author

Sarah J. Jett was born in Nebraska City, Nebraska, in 1979. She lived in five different states and attended thirteen different schools before her family settled in Austin, Texas. Currently a junior at the University of Dallas in Irving, Sarah is majoring in English. Her future aspirations include pursuing a career in teaching while continuing her writing.

Sarah has been writing since she could pick up a pen, and before that she dictated stories into a tape recorder. Night of the Pompon is largely based on her younger sister Merry’s lively stories of her misadventures in seventh grade, as well as her own memories of that time. Sarah began to write Night of the Pompon when she was an eighteen-year-old freshman in college, studying The Iliad and ancient art. “Inspired by a picture of the Athena Parthenos, the statue in the Parthenon, and by a description of the treacherous role Athena played in the hero Hector’s death,” Sarah explains, “I thought of all the cliques that had existed in my high school and began writing a story about a cult of cheerleaders.”