Robin and Renée

Robin Epstein grew up outside Philadelphia, PA in the very latest part of the twentieth century. She attended Princeton University where she majored in English, quickly realizing that she couldn’t bluff her way through Organic Chemistry, but she did have a very convincing English accent. Upon graduation, Epstein moved to New York to pursue a career in stand-up comedy – a decision that nearly killed her parents and, on bad nights, an audience member or two. While playing nightly in clubs throughout New York, she worked a day job in advertising and enrolled in the writing program at Columbia University. After dropping out (Oh, the parental disappointment!) and back in again (Thank God!), she finally earned her MFA in nonfiction. Epstein eventually found her way into a sitcom writing room and worked on several network shows taking her from New York to Chicago to Los Angeles. She also served as the head writer on a game show for teenage girls on the Oxygen network, where she appeared as the on-air sidekick known--to the three people who watched-- as Guru Robin. The Guru began writing freelance magazine pieces shortly thereafter, wrote a series of children’s books for Scholastic called The Groovy Girls, and is currently scripting video games and teaching a course at NYU.

Renée Kaplan
While writing SHAKING HER ASSETS, her first novel, Renée was a television producer in New York, most recently at 60 Minutes II on CBS (see the links to some of her stories in Other Work), and currently freelancing. Before becoming a television journalist, Renée worked in print, first as an editor for the now-defunct magazine Gear, and then as a writer and editor for the weekly newspaper The New York Observer. Renée graduated summa cum laude, totally naïve and a little misguided from Princeton, with a Bachelor’s in History and European Cultural studies. She then graduated from Harvard Law School, a little less misguided and thoroughly intent on never becoming a lawyer. In this, she’s succeeded. She was born in Ithaca, New York, and grew up between Ithaca and Paris, France, an odd back-and-forth between redneck and highbrow, which probably still sums her up today.

Author photo by Michael Cantwell