Alexandra Monir

Alexandra Monir was singing and recording before she was publishing novels. Black Canary: Breaking Silence, her entry in Random House's DC Icons series, came out in December 2020 and drops Dinah Lance into a near-future Gotham run by the Court of Owls, where women are forbidden to sing in public and Dinah's voice proves to be the thing the regime cannot control. The premise sits close to her own family history: her grandmother was Monir Vakili, the Iranian soprano who helped establish opera in Tehran and who died in 1983, before Monir was born. That legacy shaped her debut young adult novel, Timeless, in 2011, for which she wrote and recorded a set of accompanying songs. Iranian American and based in Los Angeles, she has since published the science fiction novel The Final Six and several other books for young readers.