LEAH RAEDER thinks it’s a sign that people always confuse her last name with “Reader,” because that’s what she’s been all of her life. She was born and raised in Chicago, but has traveled all over the world. As a child, she spent a year in Tehran, Iran during the tail end of the Iran-Iraq War, when bomb drills were a fact of everyday life. She learned to sleep through air raid sirens and once walked through a minefield. After that, a zombie apocalypse is no biggie. She’s lived in New York City, Los Angeles, and all sorts of places in between the two oceans, but calls Chicago home.
Leah wrote her first novel at age 8, in pencil, on looseleaf notebook paper. It was about pirates and a talking shark. She has been reading and writing ravenously ever since. Her favorite dead writers include Jorge Luis Borges, Lewis Carroll, Emily Dickinson, Vladimir Nabokov, and Virginia Woolf. Favorite living writers include Margaret Atwood, James Lee Burke, George R.R. Martin, and Jeanette Winterson. Favorite undead writers: to be determined once the quarantine is lifted.
When she’s not buried nose-deep in words, Leah does motion graphic and print design, particularly 3D animation for TV commercials and film. She’s an unabashed lifelong gamer, spending far too many waking hours immersed in MMORPGs and survival horror games like Resident Evil.
She lives in Chicago with her boyfriend, Alexander, who will stand back-to-back with her in the zombie apocalypse, blasting away until their mags run out.
Leah is represented by literary agent awesome-aire Weronika Janczuk.
Contact Leah Raeder via email at leahzero@gmail.com.