Welcome to the new and improved A. E. Lowan. We have been on hiatus, rebuilding and reinventing. Please come in, excuse our renovation mess, and get to know the new team.
Kristin Vinck
Raised as a Navy brat, Kristin Vinck began writing as a child on the West Coast, learning her love of words at her mother’s knee. Her first story, composed at five-years-old, was an instant classic in her house. “Ghostie-Ghost” was a harrowing tale of the adventures of, well, a ghost, and her friends. Kristin won her first writing award for urban fantasy in Seattle at eight-years-old for a story about a city on a boat, pulled by dinosaurs. In her teens, Kristin moved from learning at home from her satirist mother to formal writing education at the Paseo Academy of Fine and Performing Arts in Kansas City, Missouri. After careening from career to career, or as she finds it more comforting to call it, sampling the human experience widely, she settled into the life of a full-time writer in the Missouri Ozarks where she is assisted by three narcoleptic dogs and three enthusiastically obnoxious cats.
Jennifer Vinck
Raised among musicians in Kansas City, Missouri, Jennifer Vinck came to writing from another direction – poetry and song. She won her first writing award in the second grade, for a poem ironically also about a ghost. Poetry was her primary creative endeavor throughout childhood and when Jennifer was twelve-years-old she was asked to write the lyrics for a song used for All Species Day (a precursor of Earth Day) in Kansas City. She auditioned for the creative writing department at the Kansas City Middle School of the Arts and there discovered a new passion, speculative fiction. Jennifer met Kristin Vinck on the first day of school at the Paseo Academy of Fine and Performing Arts and they were instantly inseparable. They began creating epic and urban fantasy worlds within minutes of meeting and have been collaborating in fiction and in life ever since.
Jessica Smith
Jessica Smith found her passion for fantastical storytelling where so many young writers do – through the masterpieces of fantasy’s renowned matriarchs. As the pile of worlds inhabited by dragonriders, wizards, and fair folk caused her bookshelves to plea for mercy, the constellation of worlds inside her waiting for their story to be told grew and grew. With enough ideas to fill the state of Texas where she was raised, Jessica first took pencil to paper before she hit double digits with a story about reincarnation and memory. Jessica’s love of how the universe functions and the intricacies of the human mind led the way into deep scientific study, and from there into the field of medicine. It was her passion for writing that took her to the internet in search of fellow creators, of people who kept whole worlds in their minds. Jessica has been a staple of many online writing communities over the years, but it was on a fantasy-specific site, Mythic Scribes, where Jessica met Kristin and Jennifer. Her worlds and theirs collided as a whirlwind of collaboration began. Jessica writes with the assistance of a furry, opinionated office minion by the name of Sugar-Bear.
Together we comprise A. E. Lowan, the author of the dark urban fantasy series, The Books of Binding. We’re proud to announce that Faerie Rising: The First Book of Binding will be released in the spring of 2017. In the meantime, we will be introducing you to some of the characters from our world here and at our website, aelowan.com. In this blog we will be posting pieces of original fiction. Ranging from snapshot vignettes to longer glances through the curtain, we will be showing you early glimpses into the lives of our cast.
Thank you for sticking by us during our renovation. The paint is still fresh, the carpet just went in yesterday, and some of the fixtures are still on back order, but the doors are officially opening this spring. We hope that you all enjoy these sneak peeks into the world we have built. We are excited to begin this journey with all of you.