Stephanie Spadaccini

I was born in the Bronx and lived my first 20-odd years in an apartment, so I have an unnatural fear of the great outdoors, even tho I now live in California in a house with a lovely view of trees and stuff. I attended Catholic schools all the way thru, including college, which prepared me well for my future as a writer/editor. (All those sentences we had to diagram.) In grade eight, I won the borough spelling bee and went on to the New York State finals, but lost when I couldn't spell "labyrinth." (I'm still not sure that's right.) It looks right, doesn't it? I married young, had three kids, got divorced, am now a grandmother, which I like very much. I started constructing crossword puzzles when my youngest child went off to kindergarten and I sat down to solve the daily New York Times crossword. Hey, I thought, I could maybe do this. And I did. When my kids were grown, I moved to L.A. and got work writing for a few game shows, including 'Jeopardy!' But life in L.A. got old fast, so I moved to San Francisco. Now I write crosswords regularly for People magazine and AARP magazine. Besides my Uncle John Puzzle Books, these are my only regular gigs, so I'm always looking for other puzzle or non-puzzle work, like writing for the Uncle John's Bathroom Readers--a great outlet for a trivia hound such as myself.