Games Untold

Since beginning her writing career at 19 years old, American novelist Jennifer Lynn Barnes has published over a dozen young adult novels. Her publications include The Inheritance Games series (The Inheritance Games, The Hawthorne Legacy, The Final Gambit, and The Brothers Hawthorne), The Grandest Game series (The Grandest Game, Games Untold, and Glorious Rivals), the Naturals series (The Naturals, Killer Instinct, All In, Bad Blood, and Twelve), and the Debutantes series (Little White Lies and Deadly Little Scandals).

Barnes’s unique academic and vocational backgrounds inform her complex fictional worlds and deep character studies. She has “advanced degrees in psychology, psychiatry, and cognitive science, including graduate degrees from Cambridge University, where she was a Fulbright Scholar, and Yale University, where she received her Ph.D. in 2012” (“Author Bio.” jenniferlynnbarnes.com). She began publishing her young adult novels while pursuing her degrees and consistently incorporates her higher education into her fiction. Barnes is considered “one of the world’s leading experts on the psychology of fandom and the cognitive science of fiction and the imagination more broadly”—aspects of her experience that are evidenced in her imaginative fictional worlds and inventive portrayals of complex human relationships (“Author Bio.”). Barnes has also worked on pilot scripts for the television networks USA and MTV. Barnes currently lives and works in Oklahoma, where she teaches psychology and professional writing at the University of Oklahoma.

In the acknowledgments section of the source text, Barnes also acknowledges her family’s role in her writing career. She specifically cites her sons as the inspiration for her young adult stories and her young male characters.