Holly Black: Hello my name is Holly Black. I'm lucky that my name is pretty easy to pronounce because my maiden name was Rigginboch and people mangled that all the time. I actually never really liked my name growing up, especially my first name because it was too short and I wanted it to be longer and more dramatic, like Victoria or Alexandria. So I convinced my friends for a while to call me Hollery, which looking back is an even worse name that Holly.

When I met my husband Theo, we decided that we were gonna figure out a new last name and we wound up taking his last name which was Schwartz and transliterating it. It means black in German, so that's how I got to be Holly Black.