Charlotte had officially begun writing about Shira and Conrad between her eighth and ninth grade summer, but Sunburst as an idea had been with her since fifth grade, when her teacher had assigned a project based on C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia. The project requirements were simple: create a magical kingdom with three magical creatures, and invent a title that began with the same letter or sound as the king or queen’s first name. Initially, she wrote short stories about Shining Charlotte, but very quickly Charlotte found herself replaced with an entirely different person—Shira.
Charlotte completed Shining Shira in the winter of 2014, in the midst of her college applications. Right around this time, she began seriously to question her desire to be a doctor because she realized the true extent of her love for literature and writing. This was further underscored in her acceptance and decision to attend Colby College in Waterville, Maine, a liberal arts college at which humanities majors proliferate. She is a member of Colby’s class of 2019.
Charlotte has now embraced life as an English major with a concentration in creative writing and double minoring in art and in cinema studies. When not a summer camp counselor at Eagle Lake Camps in Colorado, she can be found in obscure coffee shops listening to NEEDTOBREATHE, drinking chai, and furthering her work on a new dystopian series.