Jodi Picoult is the #1 bestselling author of many novels including My Sister’s Keeper, Nineteen Minutes, The Storyteller, Leaving Time, Small Great Things, A Spark of Light, The Book of Two Ways, Wish You Were Here, Mad Honey (co-written with Jennifer Finney Boylan), By Any Other Name, and Hollow Bones.
In 2024, a study conducted by PEN America deemed her landmark novel Nineteen Minutes the most banned book in the United States. She is currently the fourth most banned author in the country.
It is estimated that there are 63.7 million books by Jodi Picoult in print. Jodi’s books have been translated into forty languages. Picoult is the recipient of many awards, including the New England Bookseller Award for Fiction, the Alex Awards from the YALSA, a lifetime achievement award for mainstream fiction from the Romance Writers of America, the NH Literary Award for Outstanding Literary Merit and esteemed Sarah Josepha Hale Award. She was the recipient of the 2024 Free Speech Defender Robie Harris Author Award from the National Coalition Against Censorship. She holds honorary doctor of letters degrees from Dartmouth College and the University of New Haven. She is a patron of the Carole Shields Prize for Fiction which is awarded to female fiction writers. She is a member of the Board of Trustees for PEN America.
Picoult is also the co-librettist, with Timothy Allen McDonald, of several musicals: Between The Lines (Off-Broadway, 2022), based on the two young adult novels she wrote with her daughter Samantha Van Leer; Breathe (2020), chosen as part of the Library of Congress COVID-19 Artist Response Collection; The Book Thief (Lyric Hammersmith, 2026), based on the international bestselling novel by Markus Zusak; and Austenland (West End concert, March 2025).
Picoult lives in New Hampshire with her husband. They have three children and two grandchildren.
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Timothy Allen McDonald is a writer whose work spans theatre, film, television and publishing — a career built despite being dyslexic, choosing words as his craft even when those words didn’t come easily.
As a librettist, his stage credits include Roald Dahl’s Willy Wonka (Leslie Bricusse & Anthony Newley), Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach (Benj Pasek & Justin Paul), Hans Christian Andersen (Frank Loesser), Austenland (Samsel & Anderson), and Jim Henson’s Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas (Paul Williams). His musicals are licensed exclusively through Music Theatre International.
His film and television credits include Jasmine Amy Rogers: Where I Wanna Be, Between the Lines, and Breathe, co-created and written with Jodi Picoult, starring Kelli O’Hara, Brian Stokes Mitchell, and Denée Benton.
McDonald is the Founder and CEO of iTheatrics, the world’s leading musical theatre education company, and Principal Adaptor of MTI’s Broadway Junior®, which draws an estimated 36 million audience members annually in North America alone — three times Broadway’s annual audience and nearly twice that of the West End. iTheatrics has adapted over 100 musicals for MTI, Concord, LW Entertainment, and Cameron Mackintosh, and worked with former First Lady Michelle Obama to develop Turnaround Arts, a nationwide initiative which infuses underperforming schools with arts and academics. He is also the lead author of The iTheatrics Method, the quintessential musical theatre education textbook, and founder of the Junior Theater Festivals Worldwide, serving more than 30,000 participants each year across North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand.
In a career spanning forty years, McDonald has written a great many words — a fair few of them misspelled — in pursuit of “making the world a better place, one musical at a time.” McDonald lives in New York City with his husband and a schnoodle named Duch.
