Justine Manzano is a YA author who prides herself on her ability to juggle motherhood, writing, editing, and the very serious businesses of fangirling and multiple forms of geekery. Her preferred genre is what she calls “Weird Stuff.” A proud Bronxite, born and raised, Justine lives there with her husband, son, and a cacophony of cats. She and her husband often spend nights sharing the couch as they watch television, laptop to laptop, communicating in that nearly telepathic fashion that comes with years of marriage. Together, they work to raise their own little padawan in the way of the geek. This project is developing quite well so far.
Primarily a lover of stories, she enjoys helping writers craft their tale and find their story’s home. Justine has worked in acquisitions and as both a content and line editor at small publishing companies, as a reader at YA lit mags, and in the corporate sector, helping people grammar it up in their legal briefs. In 2017, she co-founded The Inkwell Council, an editing trio that ran a monthly lottery and provided the winner of said lottery with a free edit of their first three chapters. In 2018, she joined the Craft Quest team as an editor and as one of the panelists for their live-streamed writing advice videos. She is currently the Editor-in-Residence in the online writing group, Write Hive.
Her short fiction has appeared in the anthologies Things You Can Create and Best New Writing 2017, as well as the literary magazines Sliver of Stone, The Greenwich Village Literary Review, The Holiday Cafe, Fiction on the Web, The Corvus Review, and Twisted Sister Literary. She received the Editor’s Choice Award for her work in Best New Writing 2017.
Her debut novel The Order of the Key, will be released by Black Rose Writing in July 2020. Her second novel, Never Say Never, will be released by Sword & Silk Books in June 2021.
She fervently enjoys exploring strange and complex relationships, and strange and complex worlds. She can usually be found at her website, www.justinemanzano.com,and she’s on all the usual social media haunts. If you’ve looked in all these places and can’t find her, she’s probably off reading fanfiction. She’ll be back soon.