Chelsea Quinn Yarbro is the first woman to be named a Living Legend by the International Horror Guild (2006). She was honored in 2009 as a Bram Stoker Lifetime Achievement by the Horror Writers association. (The third woman, after Joyce Carol Oates and Anne Rice, to be so honored.) woman to. Yarbro is also one of only two women ever to be named as Grand Master of the World Horror Convention (2003). She is the recipient of the Fine Foundation Award for Literary Achievement (1993) and (along with Fred Saberhagen) was awarded the Knightly Order of the Brasov Citadel by the Transylvanian Society of Dracula in 1997. In 1995 Yarbro was the only novelist guest of the Romanian government for the First World Dracula Congress, sponsored by the Transylvanian Society of Dracula, the Romanian Bureau of Tourism and the Romanian Ministry of Culture. She has been nominated for the Edgar, World Fantasy, and Bram Stoker Awards and was the first female president of the Horror Writers Association. Her manuscripts are being archived at Bowling Green University. Yarbro is one of the first women to have made a successful and long career writing modern supernatural fiction.

Yarbro is best known as the creator of the heroic vampire, the Count Saint-Germain. With her creation of Saint-Germain, she delved into history and vampiric literature and subverted the standard myth to invent the first vampire who was more honorable, humane, and heroic than most of the humans around him. The world and its mortal inhabitants, not the vampires, are forces of darkness in Yarbro's long-running "historical horror" series. She fully meshed the vampire with romance and accurately detailed historical fiction and filtered it through a feminist perspective that both the giving of sustenance and its taking were of equal erotic potency. Yarbro's Saint-Germain novels are notable for laying the groundwork for the concept of the romantic vampire and 1990s upsurge of "paranormal romance" and trans-genre "urban" fiction.

Born September 15, 1942 in Berkeley, California, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro attended Berkeley schools through high school then spent three years at San Francisco State College (now University). She lost her awe of academe early -- "I grew up in the full flower of McCarthyism in a hotbed of liberal thought. It was not a pleasant time. My mother was a teacher who taught at the University of California when I was young, so the university was familiar to me. Fortunately I discovered early on that formal education is just the beginning of learning."

A professional writer since 1968, Yarbro has worked in a wide variety of genres, from science fiction to westerns, from young adult adventure to historical horror. Yarbro is the author of over eighty books, more than seventy works of short fiction, and more than two dozen essays and reviews.

On average, Yarbro writes three to four books a year, and one or two short stories and/or essays. She maintains a six-hour-a-day, six-days-a-week-at-the-keyboard schedule except when traveling. Five days a week she spends three to four hours doing research.

She has worked as a demographic cartographer (and still often drafts maps for her own books, and occasionally for the books of other writers as well), has read tarot cards and palms, and has composed music, all of which she continues to do. Over the years she has studied seven different instruments, voice, and musical theory: composition, voice, and piano have continued to be active interests for her. Her first professional writing in 1961-1962, was as a playwright for a now long-defunct children's theater company. By the mid-60s she had switched to writing stories and hasn't stopped yet.

She has a large reference library with books on a wide range of subjects, everything from food and fashion to weapons and trade routes to religion and law. She is constantly adding to it as part of her on-going fascination with history and culture; she reads incessantly, searching for interesting people and places that might provide fodder for stories.

A skeptical occultist for forty years, Yarbro has studied everything from alchemy to zoomancy, and in the late 1970s worked occasionally as a professional tarot card reader and palmist at the Magic Cellar in San Francisco.

Divorced, she lives in her hometown Berkeley, California with three cats.

Chelsea Quinn Yarbro is represented by the Irene Kraas, Kraas Literary Agency. Contact irenekraas@sbcglobal.net for information.