About
In a Nutshell
Adriana Brad Schanen was born in Romania, raised in Chicago, and now lives in Montclair, NJ with her family and a shaggy 60-pound lap dog named Oliver. She can usually be found in her attic study, writing books for kids and teens or the occasional screenplay. Her early middle-grade series, QUINNY & HOPPER (Disney-Hyperion and Little, Brown), won the OASL’s Beverly Cleary Children’s Choice Book Award. Her teen/family comedic drama feature “Gifted” was a finalist for the Academy’s Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting.
From Soup to Nuts
I lived in a picturesque farming village on the Romanian-Hungarian border until I was almost five years old.
A calm and well-behaved child, I never snuck off to bother the neighbors’ chickens and goats, no never.
Despite the rural beauty, life in Communist Romania in the 1970s was no picnic. My brave, eccentric father managed to escape and seek political asylum in Austria. Eventually my family settled in Chicago, where my brother and I grew up.
In elementary school, I became a competitive figure skater, which meant waking at the crack of dawn to practice, missing tons of school, and ultimately living away from home to train with fancy (and slightly-scary) coaches.
Here I am at an early morning practice in knee pads and something called a “crash pad” (don’t ask).
Taking the ice to compete stirred up two feelings: terror and tenacity.
I taught figure skating as an undergraduate at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, then headed off to New York City, where I went to graduate school at Columbia and began a career in fashion. At night I wrote – story after story, draft after draft – and I still do, with a beginner’s mindset. There are three qualities I feel are essential to creating narratives that come to life: humility, confidence, and an endless willingness to revise.
The leaning tower of Quinny & Hopper rough drafts.
Besides books, I also love to write screenplays. My teen/family comedic drama “Gifted” was a finalist for the Academy’s Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting and spent a few years bouncing in and out of development. My sports drama, “Podium,” about a group of elite figure skaters training toward Nationals, was a Nicholl semi-finalist.
I met my husband, Glen, when he sat down next to me on a flight from New York to Montreal. Our two lively, opinionated daughters inspire and baffle me in equal measure. When not writing, I enjoy reading anything by Annie Dillard, Kazuo Ishiguro or Sara Pennypacker; watching anything directed by Alexander Payne, Nicole Holofcener or Lisa Cholodenko; and playing the piano badly.