Pamela Redmond Satran

Pamela Redmond Satran, now known as Pamela Redmond, is an American entrepreneur and author of fiction and nonfiction. She was born on April 10, 1953, in New York City to Joseph Paul Redmond and Margaret Goudie Redmond, and was raised in Norwood, New Jersey. Her career has moved through magazines, books, the Internet, and television, with a steady interest in how people present themselves, name themselves, and rethink the choices that define a life.

Redmond earned a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1975, where she was arts editor of The Daily Cardinal. After college she moved to Brooklyn and worked at Glamour magazine in New York, first as a fashion editor and later as a fashion features editor. That background in style, image, and cultural trends led directly to one of the major subjects of her career: personal names.

She left Glamour to co-author Beyond Jennifer & Jason in 1988 with Linda Rosenkrantz, a book that analyzed style, image, and trends in English personal naming. The pair went on to write ten books on the subject, including The Baby Name Bible and Cool Names. In 2008, after seeing name information move from books to the Internet, Satran and Rosenkrantz founded Nameberry. Satran is the CEO of the site, which is described as the world’s largest baby name website, with a database of more than 70,000 names, thematic naming lists, a daily blog, and forums for name searchers and enthusiasts.

Alongside her nonfiction work, Satran has written novels about women’s lives and issues from both contemporary and historical points of view. Her first novel, The Man I Should Have Married, was published in 2003 and follows a woman retracing the decisions of her life and correcting her mistakes. Her 2005 novel Younger, about a woman in her forties who pretends to be in her twenties to get an entry-level job, became the basis for the TV Land series of the same name, created by Darren Star and starring Sutton Foster, Hilary Duff, Debi Mazar, and Miriam Shor. The show debuted on March 31, 2015. Redmond later published the sequel Older in 2020.

Her fiction also drew from family history. The Possibility of You, published in 2012, was inspired by the story of her Irish grandmother moving to the United States in the early 20th century, and examines three women facing unplanned pregnancies at three key moments in U.S. history. Satran’s own life included long stays in Montclair, New Jersey, Hampstead in London, and Berkeley, California, where she studied novel writing with Elizabeth George and Ann Packer. Across her books, her work stays close to ordinary decisions with large consequences: a name chosen for a child, a job sought under false assumptions, a past reconsidered, a family story retold.