Cecil Castellucci is the author of many acclaimed books for older readers, including
Boy Proof, The Queen of Cool, and Beige. She lives in Los Angeles.
“I’m a card-carrying sci-fi geek and proud of it,” Cecil Castellucci proclaims. The lead player in her debut novel, Boy Proof, would probably say the same thing. Victoria Jurgen, aka Egg, is an antisocial cinephile who meets up with the worldly new guy at school—a quick-witted artist who’s savvy enough to see through her sci-fi disguise. Both Cecil Castellucci and Egg have a passion for the creativity and imagination that are the hallmarks of science fiction.
The author’s creativity goes all the way back to her childhood years growing up in New York. She wrote her first story at the age of five. It was one paragraph long, and every word was misspelled. Later she attended the LaGuardia High School for the Performing Arts, where she studied theater, wore vintage clothes, watched a lot of old black-and-white movies, and saw numerous Broadway plays.
From there, the talents of Boy Proof’s creator only continued to grow. Cecil Castellucci’s second young adult novel, The Queen of Cool, was published in 2006. “Sometimes I feel cool and other times I feel like the biggest loser ever,” the author admits. “So I started wondering, what would happen if everything you always thought was cool was suddenly lame? What would happen to you if you were all of a sudden uncool? And what exactly is ‘cool,’ anyway? The Queen of Cool came out of a desire to figure it all out.” About her third young adult novel, Beige, she says, “When I first moved to Los Angeles from Montreal . . . everyone was So-Cal Punk crazy and I felt so . . . beige. I wondered what it would be like to grow up around adults that cool, especially if you were plopped into that scene when it wasn’t yours.”
Not only is Cecil Castellucci a writer, she is also a filmmaker and is co-founder of the short-film club Alpha 60, which is dedicated to creative endeavors in film. She can be seen acting in her own and others’ performance pieces and plays. She is also known as a singer-songwriter under the pseudonym Cecil Seaskull, and was the lead Nerd in the band Nerdy Girl.
So what more should you know about this imaginative artist? Here are a few fun facts:
Three Things You Might Not Know About Cecil:
1. She waited in line for six weeks in a tent on Hollywood Boulevard, in front of the Mann’s Chinese Theatre, for tickets to Star Wars: Episode I.
2. Oriental poppies are her favorite flower; pomegranates are her favorite fruit.
3. Her feet are very tiny and she has been known to walk with only one high heel shoe on (a la Cinderella).
Cecil Castellucci lives in Los Angeles, in the “belly of the beast” known as Hollywood.
