Jodi Lynn Picoult () is an American writer. Picoult has published 28 novels, accompanying short stories, and has also written several issues of Wonder Woman. Approximately 40 million copies of her books are in print worldwide, translated into 34 languages. She was awarded the New England Bookseller Award for fiction in 2003. Picoult writes popular fiction which can be characterised as family saga. She frequently centres storylines around a moral dilemma or a procedural drama which pits family members against one another. She is often characterised as an author of chick-lit. Over her writing career, Picoult has covered a wide range of controversial or moral issues, including abortion, assisted suicide, race relations, eugenics, LGBT rights, fertility issues, religion, the death penalty, and school shootings. She has been described as, "a paradox, a hugely popular, at times controversial writer, ignored by academia, who questions notions of what constitutes literature simply by doing what she does best." Early life Picoult was born in Nesconset, New York, on Long Island and has one younger brother. She graduated from Smithtown High School East in June, 1983. She has described her family as "non-practicing Jewish". Picoult wrote her first story at age five, titled "The Lobster Which Misunderstood". Picoult's mother and grandmother were both teachers, and she says that their influence on her was very important. Education Picoult studied creative writing at Princeton University with Mary Morris, and graduated in 1987 with an A.B. in English after completing a 320-page-long senior thesis titled "Developments." She published two short stories in Seventeen magazine while still in college. Immediately after graduation, she began a variety of jobs, ranging from editing textbooks to teaching eighth-grade English. She earned a master's degree in education from Harvard University. Picoult has two honorary Doctor of Letters degrees; one from Dartmouth College in 2010, the other from the University of New Haven in 2012. In 2016, Picoult was selected to be Princeton's Class Day Speaker before commencement. Career Picoult became the writer of the DC Comics series Wonder Woman (vol. 3), following the departure of Allan Heinberg. Her first issue (number 6) was released on March 28, 2007, and her last was issue number 10, released on June 27, 2007. Nineteen Minutes, Picoult's novel about the aftermath of a school shooting in a small town, published on the 9th March 2007, was her first book to debut at number 1 on the