Louder Than Words: The First Collection: 3 True Stories of Ordinary Girls with Extraordinary Lives

WHAT DO YOU GET WHEN YOU GIVE TALENTED TEEN girl writers a chance to share their life story with the world? The firstever series of teen-authored memoirs: Louder Than Words. Each Louder Than Words book features a young author sharing her powerful story through unique prose, journal entries, and poetry. Louder Than Words: The First Collection features three unique books written by three incredible teen authors in one riveting compilation.

In Marni: My True Story of Stress, Hair-Pulling, and Other Obsessions, Marni Bates brings us inside her secret world of 'pulling' and the challenges of surviving high school while trying to hide an obscure stress disorder.

Then in Emily: My True Story of Chronic Illness and Missing Out On Life, Emily Smucker takes us through the senior year that wasn't when chronic illness forced her to miss out on one of the most important times of her life.

And finally in Chelsey: My True Story of Murder, Loss, and Starting Over, Chelsey Shannon uses writing as a way to recover from experiencing the unthinkable when her father was murdered the week before her fourteenth birthday.

Because Truth Is More Fascinating Than Fiction www.louderthanwordsbooks.com

Marni Bates is a freshman at Lewis & Clark College. She wrote her first novel, That's Debatable, between filling out college applications and is currently looking for an agent. She loves writing and hopes to do it professionally throughout her life. Marni was recommended for this series by the The Oregon Writing Project at Willamette University.

Seventeen-year-old Chelsey Shannon is a junior at the School for Creative and Performing Arts in Cincinnati, OH, where she majors in creative writing. In addition to writing, she loves astrology, cooking, literature, playwriting, and psychology. She literally surrounds herself with books, working as a shelver at the The Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County.

Emily Smucker loves to write. She keeps a regular diary and takes a notebook with her everywhere she goes. Emily is a Mennonite and born-again Christian, and considers her heroes to be Peter Parker, Hadassah, and Luke Skywalker, because they made the right choice and it changed the world. She loves dreams, Dr. Pepper, badminton, watching people, making movies, and unlike 99.5% of Mennonite girls in America, not coffee or scrapbooking. Her online blog can be found at http://www.xanga.com/SupergirlEmzel.