Megan McCafferty

McCafferty hails from the Bayville section of Berkeley Township, New Jersey, and moved to Brooklyn and Manhattan before settling in Princeton, New Jersey.{{cite news |last=Ervolino |first=Bill |title=Jessica's a step behind her author |work=The Record |date=September 9, 2007 |quote=Like her heroine, McCafferty knows her way around the Garden State, having grown up in Bayville before moving to Brooklyn and Manhattan and then getting married and settling in ... Princeton.}} She graduated from Central Regional High School in Berkeley Township, New Jersey in 1991.{{cite news |title=Darling author returns to Berkeley |work=Asbury Park Press |date=September 25, 2007 |quote=BERKELEY: Author Megan McCafferty, a 1991 Central Regional High School graduate, will visit the township branch of the Ocean County Library at 7 pm today.}} McCafferty attended the University of Richmond before transferring to Columbia University to earn a bachelor's degree in English. After graduation, McCafferty worked in magazine publishing as an editor for Cosmopolitan, YM, and Fitness magazines. She began her writing career with writing short stories and articles for various teen magazines.

McCafferty's first novel, Sloppy Firsts, was published on August 28, 2001.{{cite book |title=Sloppy Firsts (Hardcover): Reviews and Product Details |isbn=0609807900 |last1=McCafferty |first1=Megan |year=2001 }} Told from the diary-style perspective of character Jessica Darling herself, the series chronicles her misadventures through high school, college, and beyond.{{cite web |url=http://www.meganmccafferty.com/books/ |title=Megan McCafferty: Books |publisher=MeganMcCafferty.com |access-date=May 31, 2009 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090531140015/http://www.meganmccafferty.com/books/ |archive-date=May 31, 2009 |df=mdy-all }} McCafferty subsequently published Second Helpings on April 22, 2003.{{cite book |title=Second Helpings (Hardcover): Reviews and Product Details |isbn=0609807919 |last1=McCafferty |first1=Megan |year=2003 }} This was later followed by Charmed Thirds (April 11, 2006),{{cite book |title=Charmed Thirds (Hardcover): Reviews and Product Details |isbn=1400080428 |last1=McCafferty |first1=Megan |year=2006 }} Fourth Comings (August 7, 2007),{{cite book |title=Fourth Comings (Hardcover): Reviews and Product Details |isbn=978-0307346506 |last1=McCafferty |first1=Megan |date=August 7, 2007 }} and Perfect Fifths (April 14, 2009).{{cite book |title=Perfect Fifths (Hardcover): Reviews and Product Details |isbn=978-0307346520 |last1=McCafferty |first1=Megan |year=2009 }} Perfect Fifths, the fifth and final Jessica Darling novel, is the only book in the series told in third person from the alternating perspectives of Jessica Darling and her long-time love, Marcus Flutie. The third, fourth and fifth books all made the New York Times Best Seller List. A Sloppy Firsts stage play inspired by the first book in the series premiered at Round House Theater in March 2018.

McCafferty also published a Jessica Darling short story called "Fifteen Going On ..." in a May 25, 2004 anthology called Sixteen: Stories About That Sweet and Bitter Birthday, which she also edited.{{cite book |title=Sixteen: Stories About That Sweet and Bitter Birthday: Reviews and Product Details |isbn=140005270X |last1=McCafferty |first1=Megan |year=2004 }}

McCafferty announced in 2012 that she would be publishing a new Jessica Darling prequel series titled It List, aimed at middle-grade readers. The first of the novels, Jessica Darling's It List #1: The (Totally Not) Guaranteed Guide to Popularity, Prettiness & Perfection was published on September 3, 2013.{{cite web|title=McCafferty Does Middle Grade for Poppy|url=http://www.meganmccafferty.com/new-jessica-darling-novels/|work=Publishers Weekly|access-date=November 28, 2012}} The sequels Jessica Darling's It List #2: The (Totally Not) Guaranteed Guide to Friends, Foes & Foe Friends and Jessica Darling's It List #3: The (Totally Not) Guaranteed Guide to Stressing, Obsessing and Second Guessing were published in September 2014 and June 2015. In June 2016 MarVista Entertainment released Jessica Darling's It List, a digital film based on the first book in the series.

In 2006, Harvard student and novelist Kaavya Viswanathan was accused of plagiarizing from Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings in her novel How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life.

McCafferty published Bumped, a dystopian young-adult novel, on April 26, 2011.{{cite web|url=http://www.harperteen.com/books/Bumped-Megan-Mccafferty/?isbn=9780061962745|title=Bumped by Megan McCafferty|publisher=HarperTeen.com|access-date=May 9, 2011}}{{cite web|url=http://bitchmagazine.org/post/megan-mccafferty|title=A Conversation with Megan McCafferty|publisher=Bitch Media|access-date=May 17, 2011}} Its sequel Thumped was published on April 24, 2012. She published a middle-grade novel, True to Your Selfie (Scholastic), about two 12-year-old best friends and social media influencers, on February 4, 2020.{{Cite web|last=|first=|date=|title=Publishers Weekly review of True to Your Selfie|url=https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-338-29699-0|archive-url=|archive-date=|access-date=2020-09-11|website=www.publishersweekly.com}} Her realistic historical fiction young adult novel The Mall (Wednesday Books), set in the early 1990s, was published on July 28, 2020.{{Cite web|last=|first=|date=|title=Publishers Weekly Review of The Mall|url=https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-250-20995-5|archive-url=|archive-date=|access-date=2020-09-11|website=www.publishersweekly.com}}

She has also contributed to several fiction and nonfiction anthologies. Her work has been translated into eleven languages including Bulgarian, Chinese and German and has been awarded numerous honors by such associations as the American Library Association and the New York Public Library. McCafferty at one time kept what she termed a "retro(blog)" on her website in which she posted actual journal entries and creative writing from her adolescence.

1. Girls' Night In, edited by Lauren Henderson, Chris Manby and Sarah Mlynowski
2. It's a Wonderful Lie: 26 Truths About Life in Your Twenties, edited by Emily Franklin
3. Everything I Needed To Know About Being a Girl I Learned From Judy Blume, edited by Jennifer O'Connell
4. If I'd Known Then: Women in Their 20s and 30s Write Letters to Their Younger Selves, edited by Ellyn Spragins
5. A New Dawn: Your Favorite Authors on Stephenie Meyer's Twilight Series, edited by Ellen Hopkins
6. Does This Book Make Me Look Fat? Stories about loving—and loathing—your body, edited by Marissa Walsh
7. My Little Red Book, edited by Rachel Kauder Nalebuff

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• {{official website}}
• {{cite web |url=http://bulletin.gmnews.com/news/2006/0518/Front_Page/006.html |title=Author McCafferty talks shop with Brick's Lit Chicks |first=Colleen |last=Lutolf |work=Brick Township Bulletin |publisher=BulletinGMNews.com |date=May 18, 2006 |access-date=May 31, 2009 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090706002933/http://bulletin.gmnews.com/news/2006/0518/Front_Page/006.html |archive-date=July 6, 2009 |df=mdy-all }}
• [https://web.archive.org/web/20060623020956/http://popgurls.com/article_show.php3?id=514 "20 Questions with Author Megan McCafferty" – PopGurls.com]
• [https://web.archive.org/web/20110426082406/http://chickloveslit.com/2011/04/review-bumped-by-megan-mccafferty.html "Bumped Book Review" – ChickLovesLit.com]
• {{isfdb name|154091}}
• {{LCAuth|n2001026571|Megan McCafferty|11|}}

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Category:1973 births

Category:Living people

Category:21st-century American novelists

Category:American women novelists

Category:Writers from Brooklyn

Category:Writers of young adult science fiction

Category:People from Berkeley Township, New Jersey

Category:Writers from Princeton, New Jersey

Category:Central Regional High School alumni

Category:Columbia College (New York) alumni

Category:University of Richmond alumni

Category:21st-century American women writers

Category:Novelists from New York (state)