Stars That Make Dark Heaven Light
Sharon Joss
Choong Yoon
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
The daughter of a college biology professor, Sharon Joss was born in Oregon and raised in central California, where she learned at an early age to identify many different species of birds and desiccated road kill. She has worked as a waitress, bartender, and operating system software programmer for the space shuttle Columbia before earning a master’s degree in Management of Technology.
At an early age, the novels of Rudyard Kipling, Andre Norton, and Ray Bradbury inspired her lifelong love of speculative fiction. As a child, she dreamed of speaking to animals and the magic of flight. Although she wrote (and illustrated) her first book at the age of nine, she did not begin to write seriously until 2009. Since then, she has written five novels and more than a dozen short stories.
After living in upstate New York and Idaho, in 2012 she decided to return to Oregon, where she now lives amid a thicket of blackberry vines and writes full-time. Although she made her first professional short story sale in 2013; Writers of the Future marks her second professional publication.
You can find Sharon online at www.sharonjoss.com or follow her on Twitter @josswrites.
ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR
Choong Yoon was born in Anyang, South Korea and moved to Seoul at the age of ten. He loved drawing animated characters and copying comic book panels, which helped him make friends in the new city.
But drawing became more than just a tool to make friends. His interest and passion for it grew until eventually his parents had to take him to a private atelier near his home so he could learn academic art at a young age.
Academic art lessons naturally led him to apply to an art high school. Studying art in high school naturally led him to pursue art in college. He studied fine arts in Seoul National University. In the art school, he was able to meet many people from different departments who were just as passionate about the craft.
His love of comics and animation never faded even though most students in the fine arts department were into gallery work. He was fascinated with the arts that involve narrative storytelling, scenes with characters and drama, so he transferred to the School of Visual Arts in New York to study illustration and learn how to tell stories with images.
After graduating SVA in May 2014, Yoon began working as a freelance illustrator in New York and he is developing a short animated film with his friends.