Maggie Stiefvater

Margaret Stiefvater ( ; née Heidi Hummel; born November 18, 1981) is an American author who is best known for her young adult fantasy series The Wolves of Mercy Falls and The Raven Cycle.

Life and career Early life and education Maggie Stiefvater was born Heidi Hummel on November 18, 1981, in Harrisonburg, Virginia. At age sixteen, she legally changed her first name to Margaret. As a child, Stiefvater was a voracious reader who enjoyed writing. By age sixteen, she was submitting manuscripts to publishers. Stiefvater attended Mary Washington College, graduating with a B.A. in history. By the time she had entered college, she had already written over thirty novels, including four thrillers about the Irish Republican Army, a historical blockade runner novel, and a high-fantasy novel about "impassioned enchanters fighting among civil unrest."

In 2010, she gave a TEDx Talk for NASA entitled "How Bad Teens Become Famous People", in which she reflects on her youth as a "Bad Teen" and how those years have impacted her.

Writing career Stiefvater published her first novel, Lament, in 2008. Before Lament had been released, she sold the rights to its sequel, Ballad, and to Shiver, the first book in her The Wolves of Mercy Falls trilogy. She published Ballad in 2009. That same year, she published Shiver, which spent more than forty weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list. In 2010, she published the sequel, Linger. In 2011, she published Forever, the third novel of the trilogy. There are over 1.7 million copies of The Wolves of Mercy Falls series in print and more than thirty-six foreign editions have been licensed.

In 2011, Stiefvater published The Scorpio Races, which received five starred reviews and was named a Michael L. Printz Award Honor Book. In 2012, she published The Raven Boys, the first novel in her series The Raven Cycle. In 2013, she published the second novel, The Dream Thieves. In 2014, she published Sinner, a spin-off novel to The Wolves of Mercy Falls trilogy about two of the supporting characters after the events of Forever, and Blue Lily, Lily Blue, the third novel of The Raven Cycle. In 2016, she published The Raven King, the fourth and final novel. The Raven Cycle was adapted into a graphic novel in 2025, and The Dream Thieves followed in 2026.

In 2017, she published All the Crooked Saints. Between 2019 and 2022, she published The Dreamer Trilogy, three novels set in the world of The Raven Cycle after the events of The Raven King. In 2022, she also published Bravely, the sequel to the 2012 Pixar film Brave.

In 2025, Stiefvater published The Listeners, her first novel for adults.

Stiefvater has written on her blog about her techniques and methods when writing. In 2018 and 2019, Stiefvater gave writing seminars entitled Portraits & Dreams: Writing with Maggie Stiefvater. It included a lecture and a Q&A. She gave this lecture in Edinburgh, New York City, Seattle, Austin, Los Angeles, Brooklyn, Toronto, and Vancouver.

Music Stiefvater plays various musical instruments. She recorded original compositions for the audio books of The Scorpio Races and The Raven Cycle. She has a SoundCloud account where she releases her original tracks. Stiefvater has released playlists for some of her novels of songs she listened to while writing.

Art

Before turning to writing full-time, Stiefvater was a professional portrait artist, specializing in colored pencil.

Stiefvater created a tarot card deck, The Raven's Prophecy Tarot Cards, in September 2015.

She was asked to create a poster for the American Library Association to promote reading. The poster includes characters from The Raven Cycle and the phrase "The future belongs to those who read."

Cars Stiefvater greatly enjoys cars, especially fast ones. She has worked as an automotive journalist.

Stiefvater has frequently used her passion for vehicles to promote her novels. To promote the second book of The Raven Cycle, The Dream Thieves, Stiefvater spray-painted her own car. She later allowed fans to also spray-paint the vehicle at the book's launch in Kansas City on September 18, 2013. She repeated this for another event in October 2016, where she let fans paint her Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution X. In 2013, Stiefvater went rally racing in a race car printed with the cover of The Raven Boys.

In 2015, Stiefvater drove her Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution X in a race against fellow author John Green at the Princeton Speedway in Princeton, Minnesota. Both of their vehicles caught fire. The two became engaged when she was nineteen. On social media, she refers to her husband as Lover and her children as Thing 1 and Thing 2.

Awards and nominations Award Year Category Work Result Bram Stoker Award 2012 Young Adult Novel The Raven Boys Locus Award 2013 Young Adult Book The Raven Boys 2014 Young Adult Book The Dream Thieves 2015 Young Adult Book Blue Lily, Lily Blue Michael L. Printz Award 2012 The Scorpio Races Mythopoeic Award 2012 Children's Literature The Scorpio Races 2017 Adult Literature The Raven Cycle