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Spring 2012 Flying Starts: Debut Children's and YA Authors
Profiles of five new authors making a splash this season.
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Spring 2013 Flying Starts: Nicole Griffin
If you ask Nicole Griffin whether she always wanted to write YA books, she doesn't hesitate.
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Spring 2012 Flying Starts: Marissa Meyer
When Marissa Meyer decided to remake the popular fairy tale Cinderella, little did she know that she would soon be living out her own fairy tale. Cinder (Feiwel and Friends), a dystopian, sci-fi young adult novel about an outcast cyborg who unwisely falls for a handsome prince and winds up at the center of an interplanetary war, was released in early January and soon found a place on bestseller lists.
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Spring 2012 Flying Starts: emily m. danforth
No, that’s not a typo: emily m. danforth does not capitalize her name. “But not for interesting theoretical or political reasons,” she says. “I just like the way that it looks, and I’ve done it ever since high school.” She’s happy to see her name any way people want to style it, though, most especially on the cover of her debut novel, The Miseducation of Cameron Post (HarperCollins/Balzer & Bray).
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Spring 2012 Flying Starts: Christopher Healy
Like so many little girls, Christopher Healy’s daughter went through a “heavy princess phase” a few years back. Healy, then a freelance magazine writer, discussed what he termed parental “princess fatigue” in an essay for Salon.com. And while he would often commiserate with other parents who were troubled by archetypical images of passive princesses, he was also perturbed by the vacuous nature of Prince Charming in fairy tales like Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, and Cinderella. “He’s so inconsequential,” Healy says. “He’s presented as the ideal man, but he has no personality.” If princesses are going to fall in love with princes, he continues, then “shouldn’t we care about who these men are?”
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Spring 2012 Flying Starts: Leigh Bardugo
Leigh Bardugo’s path to publication took a few twists and turns before her first book, Shadow and Bone (Holt), finally hit the shelves. Born in Jerusalem and raised in Los Angeles, Bardugo graduated from Yale with a degree in English. From there, she worked in journalism and copywriting, including some time spent crafting movie trailers. However, writing was her dream. “I’d always wanted to be a writer. Come hell or high water, I’d finish a book.”
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Spring 2012 Flying Starts: Caroline Starr Rose
In 2009, with nearly a dozen unpublished manuscripts, stacks of rejections, and no leads, Caroline Starr Rose seized what she terms a “you only live once” conviction and quit her job teaching middle-school social studies to write full-time. Her husband, a Presbyterian minister, and two sons, now nine and 11, cheered her along, and four months later Rose completed the manuscript for May B. (Random/Schwartz & Wade, Jan.), a historical novel in verse set in the 19th-century, about a 12-year-old girl left to fend for herself during a brutal Kansas winter. She quickly secured an agent, Michelle Humphrey at the Martha Kaplan Agency, and in another four months she had a book deal.
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A "Breathless" Retreat
The writer's life can be a solitary one, so when Andrea Cremer proposed that she and her fellow YA authors on Penguin's most recent Breathless Reads promotional tour – Beth Revis, Jessica Spotswood, and Marie Lu – reconvene at Cremer's parents' lakeside home in Minnesota for a post-tour writing retreat, they were determined to make it happen.
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Mother & Daughter Coauthors: Jodi Picoult and Samantha van Leer Talk to PW
Can an author who has sold millions of books learn from her daughter about writing? For the mother-daughter author team of Jodi Picoult and Samantha van Leer, writing Between the Lines was enlightening for each in different ways.
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Q & A with Patrice Kindl
After the publication of her award-winning first novel, Owl in Love, in 1993, Patrice Kindl wrote three more well-received YA novels, but Keeping the Castle, a historical-fiction comedy of manners, is her first in a decade.
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Obituary: Rosa Guy
Esteemed children's book author Rosa Guy died on Sunday, June 3, of cancer, at her New York City home. She was 89.
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Pits Dinosaur Against Santa: PW Talks with Bob Shea
In his picture book adventures, Bob Shea’s roaring red Dinosaur has taken on bedtime, the potty, and the library. Next, the invincible young dino goes up against a familiar jolly old elf in Dinosaur vs. Santa, due from Hyperion in September with a 75,000 first printing. “I know from my school visits that kids just love anything Christmas related,” Shea says of the genesis of his new story. “And I know from watching my own son that the runup to Christmas is a crazy, happy time for kids.
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Friendship Begets Teamwork: PW Talks with Jenny Han and Siobhan Vivian
These authors’ friendship began in New York City, where they were both in a graduate children’s literature writing program at the New School. They lived in the same Brooklyn neighborhood, and they’ve been working together and critiquing each other’s work since those early days.
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Balances Tragedy and Humor: PW Talks with Susin Nielsen
After being hired in the late 1980s to serve snacks to the cast and crew of the television series Degrassi Junior High, Vancouver author Susin Nielsen wrote a spec script for the show. The head writer liked what he read, and gave her a shot at writing an episode, which turned into 16 episodes—and launched her writing career.
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Book Long in the Making: PW Talks to David Ezra Stein
A girl’s contagious smile sets off a chain of good feelings that make their way around the world in Because Amelia Smiled (Candlewick), the latest picture book by David Ezra Stein, whose Interrupting Chicken was a Caldecott Honor book. The story, which he wrote in 1999 while a student at Parsons the New School for Design, came quite quickly to the author. The art did not.
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Loving Comics Pays Off: PW Talks to Lincoln Peirce
Yes, a kid’s obsession with comics really can lead to big things. Lincoln Peirce is a case in point. His Big Nate character, a high-energy sixth-grader who serves up big laughs and gets lots of detentions, is the star of a daily syndicated comic strip, an island on kids’ site Poptropica.com, a number of popular comic strip compilations, and a series of bestselling chapter books.
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PW Talks with Patrick McDonnell
Since 1994, Patrick McDonnell has created the Mutts comic strip, which has earned him numerous awards and now appears in more than 700 newspapers in 20 countries. The strip’s stars—Earl the dog and Mooch the cat—have also appeared in a handful of picture books. McDonnell has also written and illustrated other children’s books, among them Me... Jane, a portrait of a young Jane Goodall, which is a 2012 Caldecott Honor book.
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PW Talks with R.L. Stine
After giving kids goose bumps for two decades—and continuing to do so—R.L. Stine taps into grown-up fears in Red Rain, his second adult hardcover horror novel (after 1995’s Superstitious). In the novel, which Simon & Schuster’s Touchstone imprint will publish with an announced first printing of 150,000 copies, a travel writer impulsively adopts two orphaned boys—with horrific results.
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PW Talks with Maggie Stiefvater
Maggie Stiefvater’s fans got a first peek at the launch installment of her four-book series, the Raven Cycle, at BEA on Tuesday, when Stiefvater signed ARCs of The Raven Boys, due from Scholastic Press with a 150,000-copy first printing. Mystery, romance, and the supernatural come together in the novel, which introduces a boy on the hunt for a vanished Welsh king and a girl who has been told that if she ever kisses her true love, he will die.
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