Jennifer Lynn Barnes was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She has been a competitive cheerleader, a volleyball player, a dancer, a debutante, a primate-cognition researcher, a teen model, a comic-book geek, and a lemur aficionado. She wrote her first novel, Golden, when she was nineteen.In 2006, Jen graduated from Yale with a degree in cognitive science and spent a year doing autism research at the University of Cambridge. She is currently pursuing further graduate studies at Yale. Visit her online at www.jenniferlynnbarnes.com.