Valerie Thomas

Valerie was born in Berkeley, California, which means she had a protest sign in one hand and love beads in the other, by the time she was three.That’s not true. What it really meant was a pretty fantastic childhood surrounded by lots of smart, eccentric, and interesting people. She wasn’t a particularly obedient pre-teen, which resulted in her getting shipped off to boarding school in tenth grade. It turns out to have been one of the best things that ever happened to her. She found herself in an environment where it was cool to be smart, to explore ideas, and to go to college. Before heading off to college, Valerie decided to drive her parents crazy one last time and take a year off. She embarked on an adventure that brought her to a salmon cannery in Alaska, where she camped for two months before being forced out of town by a massive flood that swept her tent away. Then she was off to Paris, where she knew no one and spent a fair amount of time wandering around the city all by herself, licking her wounds. And finally, ended up in Cambridge, Mass, where she stocked shelves in a Pier One store and wondered why she had ever left Paris. Eventually, she ended up at Reed College, which is a lot like ending up in Berkeley again – it’s an intense place full of intense people, and she ate it up. After college Valerie had the good sense to put off any search for employment and get her traveling yayas out of her system, again, at least for awhile. She moved to Europe and took virtually any paying job that came her way – well, not any job (hyperbole used for comic effect). What that amounted to was short stints doing a bunch of crazy stuff, like selling T-shirts in the market in Florence, Italy; starting a brownie business in Berlin; chasing hot air balloons around the countryside in France; and teaching English to whomever would listen (somewhere in Europe someone is desperately trying to communicate in English and failing miserably, thanks to Valerie). After four years of wandering Europe, she actually missed home, and moved back to the States, to New York City, hoping to land a job in film. Valerie was enormously lucky. She found a great job quickly, but not before she suffered her way through an assistant editing job on THE TOXIC AVENGER PART THREE. But everyone has to pay their dues. Her next job was as an assistant to the producer of THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. After SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, Valerie continued to work for the director Jonathan Demme, developing screenplays with writers and producing films for the company. She produced the films ULEE’S GOLD starring Peter Fonda and SUBWAY STORIES, a film for HBO. For ten years she was the vice-president of development for Demme, overseeing such films as PHILADELPHIA, ADAPTATION, and BELOVED. When Valerie realized somewhere along the way that she might be able to write the screenplays herself, she partnered with Stacy on a screenplay and they were lucky enough to sell it to Twentieth Century Fox. From screenplay writing, Valerie made yet another leap and enrolled in the Journalism School at Columbia to get her Masters degree. She loved it, but one week before graduation, she had a baby. After her daughter entered kindergarten, she decided to go back to writing, this time turning to an idea she and Stacy had for a kids’ novel. After months of writing and rewriting and rewriting, they had a huge chunk of KARMA BITES, and their agent at WME sold it to Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt. She is currently working with Stacy on their next book, a YA novel, FROM WHAT I REMEMBER, which will be published by Simon and Schuster in 2012.