Matt Myklusch

Matt Myklusch is an American author of middle-grade and young-adult adventure fiction. He grew up in New Jersey and worked at MTV in New York for more than a decade before publishing his first novel, building a parallel career as a writer of action-driven series for younger readers. His debut novel "Jack Blank and the Imagine Nation" was published by Aladdin in 2010 and launched the Jack Blank Adventures trilogy, followed by "The Secret War" (2011) and "The End of Infinity" (2012). The series follows Jack Blank, an orphan with no memory of his past, who is rescued from a bleak orphanage and brought to the Imagine Nation, a hidden island where superheroes, robots, aliens and ninjas live side by side. The trilogy was widely shelved alongside Rick Riordan and James Patterson's middle-grade titles and was praised by School Library Journal and Kirkus for its pacing and its affection for comic-book conventions. Myklusch followed Jack Blank with the Seaborne pirate-fantasy trilogy — "The Lost Prince" (2014), "The Crimson Cutlass" (2015) and "Sea of Wraiths" (2016) — published in digital and paperback formats and aimed at the same upper-elementary-through-middle-school audience. The Seaborne books trade superheroes for tall ships, cursed treasure and the politics of competing pirate crews. His standalone novel "The Order of the Majestic" (Aladdin, 2019) and its sequel "The Lost Property Office" entry "The New World" (2021) widened his catalog into stage-magic adventure and lost-civilization fantasy. Across his work Myklusch writes in a voice tuned for reluctant readers — short chapters, cliffhanger breaks, ensemble casts and the kind of high-concept openings that take a reader from cover to first action set piece in a handful of pages.