Sandra Scoppettone

Sandra Scoppetino is an American writer from New Jersey best known for the writing of popular crime fiction and young adult novels. The most popular of her novel series are the Lauren Laurano series and the three freestanding novels she wrote in her pseudonym of Jack Early. Born in Morristown, New Jersey, Scoppettone has had a long career that spanned from the early 1960 right to the beginning of the millennium. Sandra was born in 1936 New Jersey, at a time when not many women made a name for themselves writing crime fiction. Despite the forbidding environment, she pulled herself literally by her bootstraps to write some of the most popular young adult and crime fiction, even if she had to write her crime fiction under the pseudonym Jack Early. Her Jack Early novel “A Creative Kind of Killer” in 1984 made the shortlist for the Shamus Award and an Edgar Award nomination in 1985. She had started her writing career very early when she got into writing aged 18 after moving to New York from her native New Jersey. Her first ever-published work was “Suzuki Beane” published in 1961, that she wrote with Louise Fitzhugh an illustrator. During the 1970s, she wrote a series of freestanding young adult novels such as the Emmy Award-winning “The Late Great Me” in collaboration with Fitzhugh. She would come out as a lesbian in the 70s though it was not until the 90s that she revealed her real names after publishing the Lauren Laurano series of novels. She currently resides on Southold, New York with author and life partner Linda Crawford.