Michael Stearns is the founder of Upstart Crow Literary. Formerly editorial director and foreign acquisitions manager for HarperCollins Children’s Books, before that he was Senior Editor, Director of Paperback Publishing for Harcourt Children’s Books. He has worked on hundreds of books for children and adults over the course of twenty years in the industry. He has taught a dozen classes on writing, published three anthologies of original stories, and is an award-winning writer of fiction for both children and adults—most recently The Blood Guard series under the pen name Carter Roy. He attended the Community of Writers in 1999, 2000, and 2001.