About Dan

Dan Poblocki is an American author of mystery, horror, and adventure novels for young people. He is the co-author with Neil Patrick Harris of the #1 New York Times bestselling series The Magic Misfits (writing under the pen-name Alec Azam). He's also the author of The Stone Child, The Nightmarys, and the Mysterious Four series and many more. His books, The Ghost of Graylock and The Haunting of Gabriel Ashe, were Junior Library Guild selections and made the American Library Association’s Best Fiction for Young Adults list. His work has been translated into French, Greek, Russian, German, Polish, and Farsi.

Dan was born in Providence, Rhode Island. During his pre-teen years, his family moved to Basking Ridge, New Jersey, where he often looked for adventure with his best friends. Later, he graduated from Syracuse University with a degree in theater. Subsequently, he toured the United States playing ultra-challenging roles such as Ichabod Crane in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and the Shoemaker in The Shoemaker and the Elves to packed houses filled with literally thousands of screaming children. (He hopes they weren’t screaming in fear.)

After that, he spent many hours as a traveling bathing-suit salesperson, an audience wrangler for a popular TV game show, a temp secretary, a floral assistant, and finally, a clinical admin and systems analyst at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. (EXCITING.) All the while, he was writing stories in his spare time (MORE EXCITING), often late into the night, and then early in the mornings, before the sun came up.

Dan now writes full time in Saugerties, NY where he lives with two scaredy cats in a creaky old house. He's probably working on something new this very minute!