Francesco Sedita was born on March 18 on Mott Street in the Little Italy section of New York, New York, to two native New Yorkers. Sedita studied writing at the Gallatin School of New York University. "It's this incredible multi-disciplinary program that allowed me to study many aspects of writing, including screenwriting, fiction, and theatrical writing," he says. While at Gallatin, he was a Writing Fellow for Saturday Night Live. After graduating, he wrote and directed a show that ran Off-Off Broadway for 5 years. He is now the Creative Director at major children's book publisher. Miss Popularity is his first book. Francesco has been writing since the second grade. "I wrote and illustrated a story about a dog named Blackie. My next-door neighbor read it, and when she told me how much she liked it, I realized right then that I wanted to be a writer. I love to tell people stories," he says. When he was in college, he focused on writing comedy, and even did stand-up for a time. In graduate school, he focused on writing literary fiction. "Miss Popularity seemed like a strange direction for me at first, but it was an editorial director at Scholastic who made me realize it was the book I was born to write!" says Francesco. "We were discussing the idea of a character who comes to a musty old school and totally transforms it with her personality and fashion sense, and we both had a really good laugh. And then a day or two later, I was walking down the street and the entire story came to me in a flash-I emailed my editor right away, and Cassie Knight was born!" Francesco Sedita lives in Brooklyn, New York.