About Ty Swartz

Every twelve years, four students vanish from a school built on the grounds of the old Whitmore Plantation. They are not the first. They will not be the last — unless eight unlikely kids can become something the world has not seen in generations: the Barrier Keepers.

A world hidden in plain sight

The Barrier Keepers is a ten-book young adult series — dark academia braided with dimensional and temporal fantasy, carried by a found-family of eight young heroes. It is built for readers who would rather fall into a world than be told about it, and it hides its secrets in plain sight, trusting the reader to be the detective.

Every world has a maker. This one belongs to Ty Swartz — and to understand the books, it helps to know that Ty has spent his whole life telling other people’s stories.

Storyteller first

One idea sits underneath everything Ty makes: every person is the central character of their own story, and you do not get to tell that story for them. You serve it. Whether the medium is a portrait on a wall, a face on a film set, or a paperback at the bottom of a backpack, the contract is the same — find the version of a person that is true, even when they have not yet figured out what that version is.

It started with images

Greenville, Ohio, 1990. As a teenager, Ty talked his mentor — Master Photographer Ted Grote — into shooting a senior portrait that broke every rule of the era. It worked. What Ty learned in that studio has never left him: people do not want a portrait that looks like everyone else’s. They want one that looks like them.

Ted taught him to light a face on an eight-by-ten film camera, one frame at a time, and taught him — without ever using the words — that a portrait is a contract. The person in front of the lens is trusting you with the version of themselves the picture will preserve. You do not break that trust. You earn it.

Then the wider lens

A twenty-year career in the United States Navy made Ty a photojournalist, documenting naval history across the Pacific and the Mediterranean and retiring as a Chief Petty Officer. Sixty-five countries with a camera taught him to stay calm when everyone around him is nervous — and to keep looking until he found the true thing in the frame.

Film sets and red carpets

As a Hollywood liaison, Ty worked on set during the filming of Pearl Harbor aboard the USS Constellation, on the set of JAG, and on the red carpet at the 2004 Academy Awards, interviewing nominees as they walked in. Film taught him how to help someone become, on camera, the version of themselves they came to be that day.

Teaching others to see

For years Ty taught technology and visual design, and led nearly three hundred students through an educational-travel program that reached thirteen countries — teaching young people to look at a place and actually see what was in front of them. Listening, asking the question one more time when the first answer was not the real one, became second nature.

Now, the page

None of it was a detour. All of it was preparation. Ty wrote The Barrier Keepers for the readers who used to be him — the kids who tear through a book under the covers at midnight, the ones who would rather build a world than sit through a worksheet, the reluctant readers who need one story to break the spell and then read everything in sight for the rest of their lives. The same instinct that drives a portrait drives the books: find the version that is true, trust the reader with complicated things, and make the story worth the time of someone who could have spent it scrolling instead.

Ty Swartz is a PPA Master Photographer and a U.S. Navy veteran (retired), and he writes from Texas. When he is not writing, he photographs high-school seniors at his studio, Swartz Portraits.