A Mars rover, a Syrian refugee girl, a cheetah, and a depressed teen: there are no obvious links between these disparate characters. But in the stories of children’s author Jasmine Warga, each is a touchstone for exploring themes of home, belonging, and identity.
Growing up in a small town outside Cincinnati, Warga, 37, says she felt like an outsider. “Middle school was hard for me. I was always really shy. I was one of the only kids who had an immigrant parent, and we were the only Muslim family.” Her mother is American, but her father, whose family had previously been displaced from Palestine, had come to the U.S. from Jordan for his medical residency and fellowship.
“Books were my comfort,” she says. “They saved me in lots of ways. They helped me understand that my world at that moment was small, but the world itself wasn’t small. I hoped I could write books like the ones I loved.”
Warga recalls a career day at school when she wore a lab coat, as a nod to a possible future in medicine, following in her father’s footsteps. Instead of carrying a prescription pad, however, she carried a notebook, representing her dream of becoming a writer, although she wasn’t sure exactly what that would look like.
After studying history and art history at Northwestern University, Warga, who currently lives near Chicago, started teaching sixth grade in Texas, reading aloud many of the books she’d loved as a child with her students as well as discovering new favorites. She later completed an MFA in creative writing at Lesley University. Although she had planned to write for the upper elementary
level, “the book that gets you in the door isn’t necessarily representative of all the work you’ve done before,” she says.
Her 2015 debut novel, My Heart and Other Black Holes, was YA, written as a way to process grief from the loss of a friend. She followed it up with another YA novel, Here We Are Now” (2017). She had established herself as a writer to watch, but Other Words for Home, her 2019 middle grade novel in verse, became her breakout book. Centering on a Syrian girl finding her way as a refugee in the U.S., where she faces different kinds of conflict, the story offers messages of resilience and hope. It won a 2020 Newbery Honor, as well as a Walter Award from We Need Diverse Books and a Charlotte Huck Honor from the National Council of Teachers of English.
Working with editor Alessandra Balzer at Balzer + Bray on seven of her books, Warga has continued to write stories that defy easy categorization. When the Balzer + Bray imprint moved to Macmillan last year, Warga followed her longtime editor. “She has a special gift,” Warga says. “She helps me understand what kind of book I’m trying to write and steers me in that direction.”
The trust in their relationship is such that Warga says she can send Balzer a “messy” draft and feel exhilarated rather than flattened by Balzer’s “incisive” feedback. That supportive relationship has allowed her to stretch her wings with new kinds of stories, including her forthcoming release, The Unlikely Tale of Chase & Finnegan.
As a fourth grader, Warga completed an assignment on Cathryn Hilker, who founded the Cat Ambassador program at the Cincinnati Zoo. Revisiting the zoo as an adult with her kids rekindled her interest in the zoo’s majestic cheetahs. Despite their reputation for fierceness, cheetahs are anxious creatures—especially while living in human care. So zookeepers have paired them with rescue dogs as buddies to keep them calm. This unlikely animal friendship seemed ripe with storytelling possibility for Warga, and the idea for The Unlikely Tale of Chase & Finnegan took shape.
Her research led her into deep exploration of animal communication. Because they bond early with humans and other animals alike, cheetahs introduced to dogs when young will be affectionate and playful with their new friends. Later, Warga says, cheetahs “grow into their grace.” This real-life transformation proved informative in shaping the arc of a story that explores how “friends make us braver.”
Getting into the mindset of a cheetah was challenging. But there were “entry points that felt personal,” Warga says. For example, although Chase, her cheetah character, was born in a zoo, she knows there are others like her who come from somewhere else, not unlike many of the characters Warga has created who struggle for a sense of belonging. Still, she says, she was “hesitant to write an animal story,” in part because of a certain pressure to represent her community in her work, and the predominance of animal stories in children’s books vs. narratives that spotlight marginalized characters.
Ultimately, Warga says, the story offers an opportunity to “expand the idea of what a diverse book is,” adding, “I’m bringing my lens to it.” Along with Chase & Finnegan, she’s releasing another middle grade novel this year: The Claiming, a mystery that’s part of Scholastic’s multiplatform series The Last Resort. She’s also working on a companion book for her 2022 novel A Rover’s Story.
At a time when parents, teachers, and librarians have raised the alarm about declining middle grade reading habits, Warga says she’s intentional in her storytelling, aiming to reach readers “on a lot of different levels.” Making chapters shorter, for example, is one way to “invite all our kids in” to reading in a way that’s “welcoming and accessible,” keeping read-alouds in mind. She has heard from a number of parents and readers that Rover, about a Martian probe named Resilience, is the first chapter book that many of her readers read on their own.
On the other hand, more advanced readers engaged with the book because of the subject matter. Keeping her books “high interest and paced in a way that builds a nice momentum” has proven to be a winning strategy, Warga says. “Hopefully, I’m writing books that have a literary quality, but are fun. I don’t think those things are mutually exclusive.”
Warga, who is herself the mother of two middle grade readers, believes that kids in their tween years are drawn to literary fiction because they want to be challenged and are naturally thinking about the big questions at this particular time of their lives. Increasingly, though, she sees that kids are “carrying so much anxiety,” she says. “They feel so much pressure to be perfect. They are so afraid of making mistakes.”
Through her works, she hopes to entertain and inspire wonder, but also to help young readers understand that, in her words, “you don’t have to be perfect to be worthy of love. It’s okay to be anxious. It’s okay to feel afraid sometimes. That’s what our friends and connection are for.”
Joanne O’Sullivan is a journalist, author, and editor in Asheville, N.C.
