Blanche Biography

Blanche Kapustin is an author with over 200 published newspaper and magazine articles and editor for several newspapers, magazines, and private clients.

Blanche left high school a year early to enroll in Princeton University and earned an MBA from the Darden School of Business at UVA. She has worked in a variety of industries – retail, education, finance – and draws on those experiences to help create realistic settings and backdrops in her stories.

Like many "closet writers," she was uncertain how a person with a wealth of experiences but no writing credentials could sell a movie script or literary work. While traveling in October 2003, she circled the mistakes in three publications, and when she returned home, she queried their publishers with diagrams of the mistakes and an invitation to hire her as a freelance editor. Two of the three accepted, and she was soon also writing for both publications.

Blanche inherited many of her parents' interests, including business, teaching, and community service. Though they lived in the small town of Gulf Breeze, Florida, her family often traveled, exposing Blanche to many cultures and different ways of viewing the world. Her family always empowered her to make good decisions – taking her and her brother to visit college campuses at an early age, encouraging her to join her brother and mother in Taekwondo, and supporting her long list of extracurricular activities. These influences are apparent in her fictional female characters – like the backgrounds of the four main characters of Campfire Cadets, who each represent a different piece of her life – nerd, cheerleader, blackbelt, and friend.

Blanche's husband, Vadim, has served as the inspiration for several of her characters, while he manages to provide objective feedback on her stories. Though a successful entrepreneur, he still finds time to collaborate on Blanche's research and assists her with plot development and polishing her stories.

Thrilled with her own success as a writer and editor, Blanche has shifted her focus toward the books, movies, and television shows which continue to spring from her imagination. She has organized two styles of writers' groups through her local library in an effort to build a supportive writers' community and assist peers and people who find themselves where she was pre-October 2003.