Holly Black

Holly Black, born Holly Riggenbach on November 10, 1971, is an American writer and editor best known for children’s and young adult fantasy. She came of age in New Jersey, graduating from Shore Regional High School in 1990 and earning a B.A. in English from The College of New Jersey in 1994. Before her name became closely tied to modern fairy fiction, she worked as a production editor on medical journals, including The Journal of Pain, while studying at Rutgers University. She also edited and contributed to the role-playing culture magazine d8 in 1996.

Black’s early life gave her imagination a particular kind of texture. During her childhood, her family lived in what she described as a “decrepit Victorian house,” a detail that fits naturally beside the eerie, enchanted settings that would later appear in her fiction. She once considered becoming a librarian as a backup career, but writing drew her away. Her interest in young-adult fiction was shaped in part by writers such as Garth Nix, Tamora Pierce, and Francesca Lia Block. For the fairy-tale side of her work, she has cited creators including Tanith Lee, Angela Carter, Terri Windling, Ellen Datlow, Pamela Dean, Ellen Kushner, Charles de Lint, and Emma Bull.

Her first novel, Tithe: A Modern Faerie Tale, was published by Simon & Schuster in 2002. It became the opening book in what is officially called the Modern Faerie Tales trilogy, followed by Valiant in 2005 and Ironside in 2007. Valiant won the inaugural Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy, and both Valiant and Ironside placed highly in voting by Locus readers for the Locus Awards. These books helped establish Black’s place among contemporary writers bringing faeries into modern settings with danger, wit, and emotional bite.

Black reached an even wider audience with The Spiderwick Chronicles, created with writer and illustrator Tony DiTerlizzi. The first two books appeared in 2003, and the fifth and last book reached the top of the New York Times Bestseller list in 2004. The series was adapted into a 2008 film, for which Black was co-executive producer, and later into a 2023 television series. For the television adaptation, she received a nomination for the Children’s and Family Emmy Award for Outstanding Young Teen Series.

Her later work continued to move across age ranges and forms. The Curse Workers trilogy began with White Cat in 2010 and concluded with Black Heart in 2012. With Cassandra Clare, she wrote the five-book Magisterium series, beginning with The Iron Trial in 2014 and ending with The Golden Tower in 2018. Her young adult series The Folk of the Air began with The Cruel Prince in 2017, continued with The Wicked King in 2018, and closed with The Queen of Nothing in 2019. The Wicked King debuted at No. 1 on the New York Times Bestseller List, and the series debuted at No. 3 with the release of The Queen of Nothing.

Black has also written standalones including The Coldest Girl in Coldtown, Doll Bones, and The Darkest Part of the Forest, along with dozens of short works and co-edited anthologies of speculative fiction. In 2022, she published Book of Night, her first adult fantasy, which won a Dragon Award; its sequel, Thief of Night, followed in 2025. Across these books, her appeal rests in the way she treats fantasy as close at hand: hidden in houses, schools, cities, bargains, and families. Her words still matter because they speak to readers who know that wonder can be beautiful, but also sharp-edged.