Melissa de la Cruz

Her work as a nanny and her visits to The Hamptons formed the background for the book series The Au Pairs. With the first published in 2015, she has also written the original novels for Disney's Descendants franchise.

She wrote her first full-length novel at 22 while living in New York City and working at Bankers Trust. The novel ultimately didn't sell, but she received a suggestion by an editor at Little, Brown to try becoming a journalist to work on her professional writing credits and started working freelance. She published her first essay in New York Press in 1996 and worked as a beauty and fashion editor up until she sold her first novel, The Cat's Meow, in 1998. De la Cruz has published articles with The New York Times, Cosmopolitan, Seventeen, Teen Vogue, and Harper's Magazine. After her first novel's publication in 2001, she started pursuing writing full-time, after getting laid off from the U.S. investment bank Morgan Stanley.

She immigrated to the United States with her family when she was 13, in 1985. The family settled in San Francisco, where she graduated from Convent of the Sacred Heart High School. She went on to study art history and English at Columbia University in New York City. After graduation, she worked as a computer consultant.

Melissa de la Cruz (born 1971) is a New York Times bestselling Filipina-American author known for her work in young adult fiction. She has written several series of young adult novels, including the Au Pair series and the Blue Bloods series, and a contemporary fiction series following The Beauchamp Family, as well as a number of stand-alone novels.