The Amazing Alexandra Sokoloff

 

I've interviewed well over a thousand people since I began my writing career as a journalist back in the dark ages, and one of the most amazing is Alexandra Sokoloff.

 

Alex is the bestselling, thriller award-winning, Bram Stoker and Anthony Award-nominated author of nine supernatural, paranormal and crime thrillers. The New York Times has called her "a daughter of Mary Shelley," and her books "Some of the most original and freshly unnerving work in the genre."

 

The California native grew up in both northern and southern California, the daughter of a scientist and educator, which, she says, drove her into the musical theater at an early age. She acted, sang, danced and played classical piano through the turbulent tween years, and began directing plays at age sixteen, the year she also lived in Istanbul as an AFS exchange student and started college.

At U.C. Berkeley, she majored in theater and minored in everything that Berkeley is known for. She also wrote, directed, and acted in productions from Shakespeare to street theater; trained in modern and jazz dance; directed and choreographed four full-scale musicals; spent a summer singing backup vocals in a bar at Glacier National Park, and audited at least three times as many classes in various subjects as she was actually taking. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa.

As a screenwriter she has sold original suspense and horror scripts and written novel adaptations for numerous Hollywood studios (Sony, Fox, Disney, Miramax), for producers such as Michael Bay, David Heyman, Laura Ziskin and Neal Moritz. She's also the workshop leader of the internationally acclaimed Screenwriting Tricks for Authors workshops, based on her screenwriting workbooks and blog.

Her debut ghost story The Harrowing was nominated for both a Bram Stoker award (horror) and an Anthony award (mystery), for Best First Novel. Her second novel of dark suspense, The Price, explores troubling questions of what people will do for love, or personal survival, in the eerie setting of a labyrinthine Boston hospital.

Since that time she has published The Unseen, which features a team of psychology researchers who decide to replicate a long-buried poltergeist investigation, and is based on the real-life ESP experiments and poltergeist studies conducted in the Rhine parapsychology department at Duke University.

In her fourth thriller, Book of Shadows, a Boston homicide detective must join forces with a beautiful, mysterious witch from Salem in a race to solve a Satanic killing. Her paranormal thrillers are The Shifters and Keeper of the Shadows (from The Keepers trilogy, with bestselling authors Heather Graham and Harley Jane Kozak), her edgy supernatural YA thriller, The Space Between, and the suspense thrillers Huntress Moon and Blood Moon, books 1 and 2 in the bestselling, Thriller Award-nominated Huntress/FBI series.

In her spare time, Alex enjoys adventure travel and various kinds of dance, which she has also taught and performs with Heather Graham's all-author Slush Pile Players. She's a former member of the Board of Directors of the Writers Guild of America, west, and of the Board of the Mystery Writers of America. She's also the founder of WriterAction.com, "a large and unruly online community of over 2,000 professional screenwriters" as well as a member of the Killer Thrillers! author collective.

Alex can be found blogging at Murderati.com and teaching her popular Screenwriting Tricks for Authors workshop on her Screenwriting Tricks For Authors blog.

She's also active on Facebook and Twitter, but says she's not an addict. "No, seriously," she says. "it's under control."