Stephenie Meyer was born on December 24, 1973 in Hartford, Connecticut to parents Stephen and Candy Morgan. Although she was born in New England, she grew up with her five siblings in Phoenix, Arizona. Stephenie attended high school in Scottsdale, where girls would “come back to school with new noses and there were Porsches in the student lot”, an experience Bella also had at her Arizona high school.

Stephenie went on to major in English with a concentration in literature at Brigham Young University, Utah. She met her husband, Pancho in Arizona at the age of four, but their relationship didn’t begin until they were young adults. They married 17 years after they first met and continue to live in Arizona with their three sons.

Stephenie Meyer’s life changed dramatically on June 2, 2003. She woke up from a dream featuring a vampire and a human girl sitting in a meadow – characters that would become household names in just a few years.

Meyer invented the plot during the day through swimming lessons and wrote it out late at night when the house was quiet. Three months later she finished her first novel, Twilight. With encouragement from her older sister, Meyer submitted her manuscript to various literary agencies. Twilight was picked out of a slush pile at Writer’s House and eventually made its way to the publishing company Little Brown where everyone was immediately hooked by Edward and Bella’s star-crossed love story. Twilight was published in 2005 and debuted at #5 on The New York Times bestseller list.

Meyer’s other body of work is The Host, which is expected to be a trilogy.