Shirley Reva Vernick writes award-winning MG and YA fiction, including ALA Best Fiction pick and Sydney Taylor honor book The Blood Lie. Her essays have appeared in Salon, Cosmopolitan, literary journals, and city newspapers. Shirley also helps run Storybee.com, a storytelling web service that is used as a literacy tool on five continents. NASA used it as a model for its Imagine Mars program, which combined storytelling and science for K-12 students.