Linda Lombardi

As a child growing up in New York City, Linda Lombardi played with a basket full of plastic animals instead of dolls. Much later in life, she gave up being a tenured professor of linguistics to take a temporary job as a zookeeper. Since then, she's been writing about and working with all kinds of animals, from dart frogs to dogs.

She is the author of two books: The Sloth's Eye, a mystery set at a zoo, and Animals Behaving Badly: Boozing Bees, Cheating Chimps, Dogs With Guns, and Other Beastly True Tales, probably the only book you'll find shelved under Humor that has a 25-page-long bibliography. For several years she wrote a column about pets and animals for the Associated Press.

Linda lives with two cats and two Pugs, one of whom has achieved viral fame on the Internet as the Pug in Pug Slippers. You can follow her on Twitter.