Shannon Bukaty
Shannon Bukaty is a high school English teacher and author. She currently resides in Las Vegas, Nevada with her husband and three English mastiffs. The daughter of an Australian nurse and a Chinese-American computer programmer and Vietnam veteran, Bukaty was raised in the Washington, D.C. area with her two younger brothers. After completing three years of university studying marine science, she left school to travel the world as a flight attendant, where she met her husband. The events of 9/11 sent her back to school where she received her degree in English with a specialization in Secondary Education. While teaching, she completed her Master’s in Education, but always returned to her first love, writing.
Andrew Rowell
Andrew Rowell is currently a secondary English teacher in Clark County, Nevada. He lives in Henderson, Nevada with his wife and two step-sons. He grew up in Southern California and Upstate New York with his teacher mother and publication sales rep father. He earned his Bachelor’s degree in English and Political Science at the University of Rochester. For several years after college, he worked mostly in retail book and music stores, but he also served in a legislative fellowship for a US Senator and as a staffer for a US presidential candidate. He began a teaching career in his mid-thirties, all the while writing short stories, poetry, and political commentary. He earned a Master’s Degree in Secondary Education at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, while serving as a middle school English Language Arts instructor.
Their Partnership
Bukaty and Rowell began teaching at the same Clark County school in 2004, where they developed a friendship based on their shared experiences of being new teachers. Many hours were spent attempting to understand the chaos of the profession they had entered. Shared interests in science fiction, politics, and values cemented the friendship and led to their first writing project, National Interest. Initially pitched during a phone conversation, the two embarked on a three year journey to complete the first book in the series while continuing to teach full time.