James Luceno is a New York Times best-selling author of several STAR WARS novels, including Dark Lord, Tarkin, and Darth Plagueis. He started writing in his late twenties after years of playing in rock bands, traveling widely in Europe, Africa, and South America, and working as an adventure travel guide. He wrote his first novel, Headhunters, while living in Cuzco, Peru, and worked for a decade as a painter and carpenter until he was able to earn a living as a writer. He veered from adventure novels and novelizations (The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, The Shadow, The Mask of Zorro) to scriptwriting when he had an opportunity to write for the animated TV series, The Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers, for which his close friend, fantasy author Brian Daley, was also contributing scripts. Luceno and Daley joined forces to adapt Robotech and The Sentinels, using the pseudonym, Jack McKinney. With a tight publishing schedule, they divided the original series into twelve novels, with one working on the odd numbers while the other worked on the even numbers; then they swapped manuscripts, editing each other’s books to create a unified voice for “McKinney.” All this with the animated series running continuously and repeatedly on dual VCR machines. For The Sentinels they had the series “bible,” as well as a handful of provisional scripts.
As McKinney they also wrote the four novels that comprise The Black Hole Travel Agency. Daley wrote some of the first STAR WARS tie-in novels – The Han Solo Adventures – and when in died in 1996 he passed the torch to Luceno, who was brought into the franchise as a consultant on The New Jedi Order series. He would end up spending the next sixteen years working with Lucasfilm writing novels and visual dictionaries. Luceno has a keen interest in the Maya culture, and spent years exploring ruins in Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras. Those expeditions yielded the novel, Hunt for the Mayan Looking Glass. He continues to travel and still plays guitar and bass. He has three children and lives with his wife in Annapolis, Maryland.
