Kieran Kramer

Fueled by naïveté and brash optimism, Kieran went remarkably far at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in her two years there as an analyst, editor, and member of the fast-track management Career Trainee class of 1986, with whom she underwent paramilitary operations training at the legendary Farm. Among her classmates was Valerie Plame of Plamegate fame.

She’s a $34,000 winner on The Wheel of Fortune. A decade before that, she won on Family Feud. Yes, she kissed Richard Dawson. He’s a nice man, and he was on Hogan’s Heroes, so she doesn’t regret it.

Kieran scooped The New York Times from her computer at home as a freelance journalist for The Charlotte Observer by accidentally inciting a feud between John Rosemond, family psychologist and parenting expert, and the renowned pediatrician Dr. T. Berry Brazelton, over the topic of potty training; the story was picked up by The New York Times and Dr. Dean Edell of talk radio fame.

She spent her entire junior year in college at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland, where she dated a man in a kilt, pulled pints of ale as barmaid at the university pub, and listened to bagpipes a LOT from her dorm window.

Kieran grew up one of seven kids on Johns Island, a rural sea island near Charleston, SC, and helped build her family's log home. She also played in the pluff mud, sat on docks daydreaming, rode below the bowsprit on her dad’s sailboat and watched dolphins swim mere feet away, and in general, lived an idyllic Lowcountry life.

A certified English teacher, she subbed regularly at the local high school while writing her books, which kept her in touch with teenagers, whom she adores because they’re so misunderstood.

She’s been married for twenty-one years to a great guy named Chuck, a Commander in the US Navy Reserves, and they have three kind, musically-inclined kids, all of whom have been brought up on the Beatles as the family’s go-to band.

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