Jeanne Zulick Ferruolo: Hi, my name is Jeanne Zulick Ferruolo, which I know is quite a mouthful, so I'll talk briefly about all three of my names. Sometimes I'm called Jeanne, and sometimes I'm called Jeanie, and I like both. But often, when I'm saying all three names together, I reduced my first name to one syllable Jean, because my other two names, Zulick and Ferruolo, are already kind of long and a little bit tricky.

Zulick is my legal last name. When I worked as a criminal defense attorney, I was called Attorney Zulick. But, usually the judge would say it like this, (sigh) Attorney Zulick, because I like to argue a lot, and the judge usually wanted me to stop talking. Another interesting story about the name Zulick is that it is actually wrong. How can you have a wrong name, you ask? Well, when my grandfather came to the United States from Czechoslovakia, an immigration officer didn't feel like spelling out his real last name, Zuzuglich, so he just wrote Zulick. My grandfather, who couldn't read or write, did not correct him. My grandfather's brother had a different officer, and his name was correctly documented. That's how our cousins, and aunts, and uncles, some of whom still live in Czechoslovakia, stayed Zuzuglich, while we ended up Zulick.

Finally, Ferruolo, which is an Italian name, is actually not my last name at all. But it is the last name of my husband and my children. It was really important to me to include Ferruolo on my stories, because my family was such a big part of my journey to become an author. That is a little bit about my many tricky names.