Barbara Quick is a graduate of the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC), where she majored in English and French. After a year of travel and free-lancing as a gardener, seamstress, and chef, she was trained as an editor and then became a senior writer for UC Berkeley and the University of California’s statewide administration. Her first book, Northern Edge: A Novel, was published in cloth by Donald I. Fine in 1990 and brought out in paperback by HarperCollinsWest in 1995. The story was based on two field seasons Barbara spent with a group of bird biologists in arctic Alaska.

With jacket quotes from Ursula Le Guin and Jessica Mitford, Northern Edge was in the maiden group of books awarded the Discover: Great New Writers prize (along with Nicholson Baker, Michael Herr, Hanif Kureishi, and Lorrie Moore). “Northern Edge by Barbara Quick” was the solution to a New York Times Magazine acrostic puzzle by Thomas Middleton. The novel was just optioned for a film by producer Elizabeth Stanley and screenwriter Lisanne Sartor.

Vivaldi’s Virgins took about four years to research and write. Barbara had a slight head-start, as she’d started learning Italian before she started her research for the novel. Prior to the book’s publication in English, translation rights were sold by HarperCollins in ten languages: Spanish, Portuguese (one version for Brazil and another for Portugal), Dutch, Arabic, Hebrew, German, Romanian, Russian, and Greek. (The publisher in Beirut pulled out of the deal after the book was read by the state censors. Barbara says that she relishes the idea of a samizdat edition being passed from burkha to burkha…) Film rights for Vivaldi’s Virgins are being handled by Barbara’s literary agent, Felicia Eth, in conjunction with Howie Sanders of United Talent Agency.

Barbara was in Italy again, in spring 2007, to begin research for an interim project, a young adult novel set in 14th century Bologna, this one for HarperCollins’ Children’s Books division.

Barbara’s reviews, essays and articles have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Newsweek, Ms., the Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle. Her first nonfiction book, Still Friends: Living Happily Ever After…Even If Your Marriage Falls Apart, was published by Wildcat Canyon Books in January 2000. Under Her Wing: The Mentors Who Changed Our Lives was published by New Harbinger in April 2000. Quick is co-author, with artist Liz McGrath, of the 2004 bilingual mother-daughter gift book from Raven Tree Press, Even More/Todavía Más. The Commitment Dialogues (co-authored by Barbara with Matthew McKay, Ph.D.) was published by McGraw-Hill on Valentine’s Day 2005. The book is available in an audio version, and has also been published in Spanish; a translation into Mandarin Chinese is in process.

Barbara was a senior writer and editor for the late on-line lifestyle magazine, MyPrimeTime.com, writing a weekly column (still pirated on the Internet) called “The Gender Dialogues.” She has lived or spent extensive time traveling in the British Isles, Hungary, France, Italy, Spain, Greece, Alaska, and Brazil. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her teenage son Julian, who lives part-time with his dad on a sailboat.

A trained dancer and an avid sambista, Barbara rehearses, parades and performs as a member of the corps with the Brazilian dance troupe Aquarela. She can speak, read, and write French and Italian, is fairly functional in German, Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese, and can meet and greet in Hungarian.

Her next adult novel will be set in turn-of-the-century Paris.