Charlaine Harris

Charlaine Harris is a best-selling author who specializes in mysteries and fantasy fiction. She is, perhaps, best known for her work writing the "Sookie Stackhouse" series of novels which follow the adventures of a perky blond Southern barmaid as her life becomes entangled with vampires, werewolves, and other mysterious creatures. The books were turned into the television series, True Blood, which airs on HBO.

Harris was born in 1951 in Mississippi, and has resided in the American South for her entire life. Southern culture has greatly influenced a lot of her writing, and many of her characters are from the South. Her earliest writing work consisted of ghost stories, poetry, and plays. Then, after turning to the mystery genre in the mid-1980s, Harris had her first book published. Her published works include the Aurora Teagarden series, the Shakespeare series (featuring Lily Bard), and then the most popular of all, the Sookie Stackhouse novels.http://us.penguingroup.com/nf/Author/AuthorPage/0,,1000051883,00.html

Because of her extensive work and over 25 years of publishing novels, Harris has served as a board member of the Myster Writers of America and Sisters in Crime, has been a member of the American Crime Writers League and even served as president of the Arkansas Myster Writers Alliance.http://www.charlaineharris.com/biography.html

The first Sookie Stackhouse novel. Dead Until Dark, was published in 2001 by Ace Fantasy/Mystery Publishing. At that time, the world was introduced to a feisty heroine named Sookie Stackhouse, a telepathic barmaid working in a Louisiana dive and bumping into the occasional vampire. In the Sookie Stackhouse world, vampires have exposed their existence to humans and are trying to coexist in a world that grows increasingly hostile. Sookie, and her special abillities, often get stuck in the middle of the war between vampires, humans, and all sorts of other fantasy creatures.

The novels in the Sookie Stackhouse series include:

1. Dead Until Dark
2. Living Dead in Dallas
3. Club Dead
4. Dead to the World
5. Dead as a Doornail
6. Definitely Dead
7. Altogether Dead
8. From Dead to Worse
9. Dead and Gone
10. Dead in the Family
11. A Touch of Dead

This collection of books has been turned into an HBO television series called True Blood. Anna Paquin stars as Sookie Stackhouse, and Stephen Moyer and Alexander Skarsgard star as her love interests of the vampire persuasion, Bill Compton and Eric Northman.