Rick Riordan: The Teacher Who Built a Modern Pantheon
Before there was a camp on Long Island full of demigods, there was a middle-school classroom in San Antonio, and a boy named Haley who couldn't sit still for a bedtime story unless it was about gods and monsters. Twenty years and five mythologies later, Rick Riordan is still building that world — bigger.
| Series | Pantheon | Span | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Percy Jackson & the Olympians | Greek | 2005–2009 | Complete |
| The Kane Chronicles | Egyptian | 2010–2012 | Complete |
| The Heroes of Olympus | Greek & Roman | 2010–2014 | Complete |
| Magnus Chase & the Gods of Asgard | Norse | 2015–2017 | Complete |
| The Trials of Apollo | Greek & Roman | 2016–2020 | Complete |
| The Nico di Angelo Adventures | Greek | 2023–present | Active |
| Camp Half-Blood Chronicles | Greek | 2026– | New |
Rick Riordan's path to becoming one of the bestselling children's authors alive did not begin with a query letter or a writing workshop. It began with fifteen years standing in front of middle-schoolers, and a bedtime story he made up because his son, struggling with ADHD and dyslexia, needed a hero who struggled with the same things. That hero's name was Percy Jackson, and the camp Riordan built around him has since grown to house heroes from five mythologies — with a sixth chapter of the story opening this September.
OriginsSan Antonio to the Classroom
Richard Russell Riordan Jr. was born June 5, 1964, in San Antonio, Texas, the only child of a teacher-turned-realtor father and an English-major mother who would go on to teach computer applications and graphic design at Trinity University. His parents divorced in the 1970s, and Riordan was raised primarily by his mother. He graduated from Alamo Heights High School, where he edited the student newspaper, then briefly studied music at North Texas State University before transferring to the University of Texas at Austin to double-major in English and history.
He earned his teaching certification from the University of Texas at San Antonio and spent the next decade and a half — roughly fifteen years by his own and his publishers' account — teaching English and social studies in public and private middle and high schools across Texas and California, including eight years at San Francisco's Presidio Hill School. That stretch in the classroom is not incidental texture to his biography; it is the engine room of his fiction. Riordan has said repeatedly that his years reading aloud to distractible, reluctant, and learning-different students taught him exactly what makes a middle-grade reader turn the page — and what makes them put the book down.
The TurnThe Bedtime Story That Became Percy Jackson
The idea for Percy Jackson came directly from Riordan's son, Haley, who had been diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia. As a bedtime ritual, young Haley asked his father to tell him stories about Greek heroes and monsters. When Riordan ran out of actual myths to recount, he began inventing new ones — and built them around a twelve-year-old protagonist who shared his son's diagnoses, reframed not as deficits but as the literal biological signature of being a demigod: reflexes too fast for an ordinary classroom, a mind that reads battle plans more easily than a blackboard.
The result was Percy Jackson — a boy who discovers, at the worst possible moment, that he is the son of Poseidon.
Premise of The Lightning Thief, first published 2005
The Lightning Thief was published in 2005, with four sequels completing the original Percy Jackson & the Olympians series by 2009. Twentieth Century Fox bought the film rights and released two adaptations between 2010 and 2013 — both made without Riordan's creative involvement, and both received far more coolly by fans than the books themselves. The novels needed no help; they became a defining series of the 2000s middle-grade boom, praised for blending classical mythology with contemporary American settings, fast plotting, and a narrator whose humor papered over real anxiety, grief, and a sense of not fitting the mold school had built for him.
ExpansionFour More Mythologies, One Shared World
Rather than retire Percy Jackson's world after five books, Riordan expanded it — first sideways, then outward into entirely new pantheons.
- Heroes of Olympus Five books (2010–2014) widening the cast to include Camp Jupiter, the Roman counterpart to Camp Half-Blood, and introducing characters like Jason Grace, Piper McLean, and Leo Valdez alongside returning Greek demigods.
- The Kane Chronicles A three-book turn (2010–2012) into Egyptian mythology, following siblings Carter and Sadie Kane — written and released in parallel with Heroes of Olympus, an unusual feat of simultaneous series-building.
- Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard A three-book Norse mythology series (2015–2017) set in Boston, where Riordan now lives, following a homeless teenager who turns out to be the son of Frey.
- The Trials of Apollo Five books (2016–2020) returning to Camp Half-Blood through the eyes of the god Apollo, stripped of his powers and forced to live as a mortal teenager as punishment from Zeus.
Across these series Riordan also wrote standalone companion material — Percy Jackson's Greek Gods (2014) and Percy Jackson's Greek Heroes (2015), mythology retellings narrated in Percy's voice — and a non-series novel, Daughter of the Deep (2021), a modern reimagining of Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. He also originated the concept and co-wrote the first volume of The 39 Clues, a multi-author adventure series for Scholastic that became a franchise of its own.
Newer GroundThe Nico di Angelo Adventures
In 2022, with the Disney+ adaptation in development, Riordan agreed to write a new trilogy of Percy Jackson novels as part of the deal — beginning with The Chalice of the Gods (2023) and Wrath of the Triple Goddess (2024). Alongside that trilogy, he launched a fourth spin-off series, The Nico di Angelo Adventures, co-written with author Mark Oshiro, beginning with The Sun and the Star in May 2023. The book centers Nico di Angelo — a fan-favorite character introduced in the original series whose identity as gay was confirmed in The House of Hades — on a quest through Tartarus alongside his boyfriend, Will Solace.
The Sun and the Star was conceived as a standalone novel, but its critical reception was strong enough that Riordan and Oshiro returned to write a sequel, The Court of the Dead, published in 2025. Riordan has continued to use the spin-off format to deepen secondary characters that five-book main series never had room for — a pattern that now extends directly into his newest project.
On ScreenCamp Half-Blood, Adapted
Riordan co-created the Disney+ live-action series with Jonathan E. Steinberg and serves as an executive producer, having learned from the 20th Century Fox film experience that creative control mattered more to him than a quick adaptation. Season 1, adapting The Lightning Thief, premiered December 19, 2023. Season 2, adapting The Sea of Monsters, premiered December 10, 2025. The show was renewed for a third season — adapting The Titan's Curse — in March 2025, ahead of Season 2 even airing, with a 2026 premiere planned.
The series has been a genuine critical and industry success, winning two Emmy Awards at the Children's and Family Emmy Awards: one for Riordan as an executive producer when the show won Outstanding Young Teen Series, and a second for Riordan as a writer when the pilot episode won Outstanding Writing for a Young Teen Program. The show stars Walker Scobell as Percy Jackson, alongside Leah Sava Jeffries and Aryan Simhadri as Annabeth Chase and Grover Underwood.
2026 LaunchThe Camp Half-Blood Chronicles
In May 2026, Riordan announced his most structurally ambitious project yet: a new series called the Camp Half-Blood Chronicles, set not in some future era of the franchise but tucked into the gaps of the original timeline — specifically, the period between The Lightning Thief and The Sea of Monsters, when Percy is away from camp during the school year and the demigods left behind have adventures he never hears about.
release date
Annabelle Oh
each new volume
Narrated by Katie Kim, a Korean-American daughter of Ares, the book follows five newbie demigods who break into a forbidden forest area at camp called the Wild Zone — only for one of them to go missing. Riordan has said the series is designed to stand alone, requiring no prior knowledge of Percy Jackson.
What sets the project apart structurally is its authorship model. Each volume is co-written by Riordan and a different collaborator, chosen to match the demigod whose story is being told. Book one is co-written with Annabelle Oh; book two, centered on Harper Rush, a son of Aphrodite, is co-written with Stonewall Award-winning author Kyle Lukoff, whose prior work has focused on transgender representation in children's literature. Riordan has described coordinating a single shared timeline across four different authors as the most logistically complicated writing project of his career — complicated enough that it has delayed the third and final book of his Nico di Angelo trilogy, which he says he is still completing.
The series also gives page time to characters who were supporting cast in the original five books — Charles Beckendorf, the Stoll brothers, Silena Beauregard, and Clarisse La Rue, who plays a central role in The Wild Zone itself, leading the new recruits into the forbidden zone in the book's opening chapters.
Looking AheadA Career Still in Motion at 62
Most authors who reach Riordan's level of commercial success — more than 30 million copies sold in the US alone, translated into 42 languages, a multiple-award-winning television adaptation — would be forgiven for slowing down. Riordan, at 62, has instead added a second concurrent series to his workload, while still finishing a trilogy he started in 2023 and continuing as an executive producer on a television show entering its third season.
The throughline across two decades of work is consistent: a former teacher's instinct for what keeps a reluctant reader turning pages, applied now across five mythologies, a television writers' room, and — with Camp Half-Blood — a small team of co-authors he has handpicked partly for craft and partly for who they are positioned to represent. The Wild Zone arrives September 29, 2026; the next volume, centered on Harper Rush, is expected roughly six months later.
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