About the Author

Janet Ruth Young, who lives in Gloucester, Massachusetts, graduated from Salem State College and from the creative writing program at Boston University. She was a co-editor of the literary magazine stet and a founder of Writers' Circle, the writing workshop at the Cambridge Women's Center. Her travel articles and book and theater reviews have appeared in The Boston Globe and other local publications.  She left her job as an editor at a publishing company to write The Opposite of Music. 

The Opposite of Music, published in 2007 by Atheneum Books for Young Readers, a division of Simon & Schuster, garnered enthusiastic reviews from Booklist, School Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, The Denver Post, The Boston Globe, The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, and the website TeensReadToo.  It won the PEN New England Discovery Award and was a Book Sense Pick, a Borders Original Voices selection, and an American Library Association Best Books for Young Adults nominee.  A paperback edition was released in May 2008.

Janet has appeared as a featured speaker at the annual conference of the Massachusetts Library Association, on the cable TV program The Writer's Block with John Ronan, and on the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance's Real Recovery Podcasts. To have Janet speak at your school, library, bookstore, or book group, click Contact at left.

(Want to know more?  Read a full biography  and some fun facts .)