PAMELA REDMOND SATRAN & LINDA ROSENKRANTZ
We're the coauthors of nine baby-naming books that have been published around the world. As baby name experts, we've been quoted everywhere from The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal to UsWeekly and serious books like Steven Pinker's The Stuff of Thought. We've appeared on television and radio shows including Oprah, The Today Show, CNN, and the BBC. We cowrote a regular column on names for Baby Talk and were the official baby-naming experts for Parenting.
Friends as well as writers, we began collaborating because of our mutual fascination with names. When we wrote our first book, Beyond Jennifer & Jason, Pam was the fashion features editor of Glamour magazine and Linda was already an author of several books. Both moms with backgrounds in style, we set out to look at names in a totally new way, analyzing trends and examining the images name convey and the traditions behind them.
Our material was the foundation for the very first baby-naming site on the web, ParentTime, as well as for AOL's parenting site. With the publication of our 50,000 name dictionary, The Baby Name Bible, in 2007, we were able to create our own baby-name database that's as comprehensive as it is authoritative and original.
What you'll find here is something that doesn't exist anywhere else online. Based on our 20 years of expertise and drawn from all nine of our books, Nameberry is truly a unique resource.
Our name books have included special books on ethnic names, a survey of cool names for babies, and a baby-naming journal. We've written about and been interviewed on everything from celebrity baby names to how names impact children's psyches to what people should name their pets (not Fluffy and Fido). Elements from all of those sources are included on this site.
People often ask us how we research our name material. Together, we probably own every name book ever published in the United States and many from around the world. The web offers a vast amount of baby-naming information – much of it sketchy and inaccurate, but also much that was inaccessible before. And, most essentially, we talk to parents and comb the birth announcements and the rolls of maternity wards and nursery schools and follow our style sense honed from years of experience to divine what's coming in and going out, what's hot and what's cool and what's next.
Through our 20 years of writing together, Pam left Glamour, moved from Brooklyn to New Jersey to London to California and back to New Jersey again. She's a columnist for Glamour, and writer for many publications including Good Housekeeping, Bon Appetit, and The New York Times. She is also the author of five novels and three other non-fiction books. More details of her individual work are on her website. Her husband Richard Satran is a financial news editor; her children are daughter Rory and sons Joe and Owen.
Linda left New York for Los Angeles with writer/artist husband Christopher Finch and daughter Chloe, where she continues to write her weekly column, Contemporary Collectibles, distributed nationwide by Creators Syndicate, and also contributes articles to such publications as Woman's Day, American Heritage, and Film Comment. She published a childhood memoir called My Life as a List, and a history and anthology of telegrams, and co-wrote, with her husband, Gone Hollywood and a guide to animation art.
Nameberry is a collaborative effort, which also draws on the talents of our brilliant (but anonymous) software engineer, inspired designer Jefferson Rabb, and our business partner Ed Sim. We also rely on our longtime book editor Hope Dellon and publisher St. Martin's Press, our British editor and publisher Denise Bates at Collins, along with all the parents who responded to our urging to look beyond Jennifer & Jason (and, coming next spring, Beyond Ava & Aiden) for their baby names – and now are teaching us a thing or two.
Thanks to photographer Fran Pelzman Liscio for her photo of us together.
ED SIM
Long before meeting Pam and Linda, Ed and his wife Cathy had grown to love their books having heavily relied on Beyond Jennifer and Jason for help in naming their two children. Of course, being a venture capitalist funding early stage Internet companies, Ed could not figure out why such wonderful content was not on the web. It was only fitting that once Pam and Ed became neighbors and friends that he would help Pam and Linda take their unique content and brand to the web. As a cofounder of Nameberry, Ed is going to help the team formulate their product and marketing strategy and work with strategic and advertising partners to help grow the site. Along with cofounding Nameberry, Ed is also a cofounder and Managing Director of Dawntreader Ventures. During the last twelve years, Ed has led first round investments in and actively worked with a number of Internet successes including 24/7 Media, GoToMyPC (sold to Citrix for $230mm), LivePerson (first SAAS IPO), and Answers.com/WikiAnswers.com (Nasdaq: ANSW). He also has a widely followed blog at www.beyondvc.com.
JEFFERSON RABB
Nameberry designer Jefferson Rabb is best known for his innovative websites for bestselling authors and books, including Haruki Murakami, Then We Came To The End, The Name of This Book Is Secret, and Loving Frank. A musician and composer by training, Jeff began his web career while working at MTV. The games he developed for The DaVinci Code led to a specialization designing games inspired by books, ranging from the children's series The Mysterious Benedict Society to American Psycho author Bret Easton Ellis. Jeff also scores the music for many of the sites he designs, including Easton Ellis's and Murakami's.
Though based on books, Jeff's work on Nameberry posed a new design challenge in that he was starting with an enormous amount of content. Rather than trying to capture the mood or essence of a particular book, his design goal was to get people into the site quickly and easily and to make them feel comfortable once they were there. Jeff lives in Brooklyn with his wife Karen Bronzo, a marketing executive at Oxygen Media, and their big dog Watson. You can find out more about him at www.jeffersonrabb.com.
