Yes, she can offer plenty of career advice, but looking at her resume, it’s clear that the “secret” to her success is a high drive for work. In the meantime, she’s published 12 books, including five sequels to “The Darkest Minds,” which was optioned for film before it was even published. The city is so wonderful and has so much to offer to counterbalance, but I’d been living on the East Coast for 12 years, and I just wanted to be home.” “Everything in New York is a fight,” she says. RELATED: 'Darkest Minds' lives in mediocre middleĪnd so she did, working in New York for six years before her publishing income was stable enough for her to come back to the Phoenix area. “A very kind person in William and Mary’s career guidance center was like, ‘Well, you already know so much about publishing from trying to publish your novels, why don’t you try working in publishing?’ ” She had planned to go to law school, but when she realized it wasn’t for her, she asked for some help. She is also as pragmatic as artists come. She wrote her first novel, “Brightly Woven,” as a student at the College of William and Mary and published it a year after graduating summa cum laude in 2009. In fact, Bracken, 31, got her start writing fan fiction, including a story about what happened to the droids left behind when Uncle Owen bought R2-D2 and C-3PO, and was tapped to reimagine the original Star Wars story in her 2014 novelization “Star Wars: A New Hope: The Princess, the Scoundrel, and the Farm Boy.” From fan fiction to franchise authorīorn and raised in Scottsdale, Bracken is a bit of an overachiever. “Between the ages of 8 and 12, all I wanted to read were Star Wars books.” “My dad was also a Star Wars collector, and that was my introduction to science fiction and fantasy,” she says.

Superheroes in dystopia: It fits right in with other YA franchises such as “Divergent.” But in an interview promoting the film, Bracken says her most important inspiration is more old school: “Star Wars.” And she has her late father to thank for it.

and left the remaining 2 percent with superpowers. With Amandla Stenberg - Rue from the “Hunger Games” films - starring as teenage heroine Ruby Daly, it’s about a near future where a virus has killed 98 percent of humans under age 20. Watch Video: 'The Darkest Minds' features superpowered teen resistanceĪrizona author Alexandra Bracken is excited, of course, that “The Darkest Minds,” her dystopian thriller from 2012, is hitting the big screen on Friday, Aug.

The darkest minds author