Marella Sands
Marella is a native St. Louisan who always loved reading and, from a young age, thought about being a writer. Her fourth grade teacher helped spur this idea, as she had the class write a story every day. Marella’s early masterpieces were stories that went like this:
I woke up when I heard a bonk. I looked out the window and saw a saucer. A blue-green-purple man looked out. He only had two legs.
One wonders how many legs Marella’s fourth grade self thought blue-green-purple men in saucers should have if this one were remarkable for “only” having two.
It wasn’t until she was graduating from college that Marella figured writing ought to be a paying proposition. She started submitting her stories to magazines and thus began her personal collection of rejection letters (every writer has one). That started to change in 1991 once she was accepted into the Alternate Historians, a writers group that had begun to have a bit of success.
Several short story sales and the two-book sale of Sky Knife and Serpent and Storm to Tor followed within a few years. The Tor sale prompted fellow Alternate Historian Mark Sumner to create a celebratory chocolate cake sculpture of the Pyramid of the Sun and the Pyramid of the Moon along the Avenue of the Dead in Teotihuacan. Seriously, is this not the coolest cake ever? Under the name Kenyon Morr, Mark and Marella co-authored two novels for Boulevard Books, Kingdom of Sorrow and See No Weevil.
Since then, Marella has worked for educational publishers, sold an essay and other short stories, and collected even more rejections. When not writing or preparing works for publication for Word Posse, Marella works as an adjunct instructor at Webster University; volunteers at Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site; sits on the Board of Directors of a cemetery (yes, really); is a Master Naturalist; has been learning to do taxidermy; has become a cricket fan; is doing her best to learn Twi (a language of Ghana); and enjoys living with her husband and pets. She travels whenever she can possibly afford it.
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