Tui T. Sutherland was born on July 31, 1978 in Caracas, Venezuela. Her mother, who is from New Zealand named her after the tui, a bird native to that country. Sutherland lived in Asuncion, Paraguay; Miami, Florida; and Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic; before moving to New Jersey in high school. While in high school she began doing theater, which consisted mostly of backstage work. Sutherland graduated from Williams College in 1998, after which she abandoned her ideas of a career in theater in favor of a career in fiction writing, which she found to be more stable. At the time of this writing, she was living in Boston, Massachusetts, with her husband and their two children. -- bio adapted from Wikipedia