Stephanie Campisi grew up in Melbourne, Australia, within walking distance to the local library, where she received her first library fine after refusing to give up her copy of Meg and Mog. That a lifetime of passionate creativity and financial disappointment lay ahead became clear when in Grade 4 she stood on a classroom table and masterfully unfurled a dot matrix printout of a Tintin fan-fiction epic. Thankfully, her portfolio and printer have undergone significant upgrades since.
Stephanie holds an honours degree in Linguistics from the University of Melbourne, Australia, which she somehow leveraged into jobs in educational and journals publishing, and now puts to poor use as an advertising copywriter. She atones for the work she does in her day job by writing books, and is to date the author of some 30 published or forthcoming books for young readers, including the Warrior Fairies middle grade series, numerous picture books, and a chapter book series. Her work is characterised by wit, whimsy, wordplay, witches and occasionally other things not beginning with the letter “w”. Like grief, ghosts and chocolate gateau, all of which are important motifs in The Unfinished Business, the first in a spooky yet cheerful duology through Regal House/Fitzroy Books. The Unfinished Business is (she hopes) a charming meditation on the many things we struggle to let go of – including, in Stephanie’s case, the fabled school spoon given only to high-achievers at her secondary school, which makes a notable cameo in the book. As with many worthwhile pursuits in life, The Unfinished Business began as a Post-It note reminder (“favours for ghosts?”), growing into a novel when a woman knocked on the author’s door to opine about the surfeit of spectral figures in children’s books. Stephanie did not take the literature the woman offered her. But she did create some of her own.
Since moving from lovely but rainy Melbourne to the US a decade ago, Stephanie has lived in lovely but rainy Portland, Oregon, a rainy (and haunted) town in Washington state, and rainy eastern Tennessee. Having had quite enough of the rain, she now lives in the California desert with her inquisitive son (a budding morphologist), her coffee roaster husband, and a Jack Russell terror/terrier, Samson. She is still within walking distance of the local library, and she still loves Meg and Mog.
