Roseanne A. Brown

“Fun fact about me: my family immigrated from Ghana, so English actually isn’t my first language,” says Roseanne A. Brown, the author of A Song of Wraiths and Ruin. She credits the books of folklore that an aunt in Ghana sent to her new home in Washington, D.C., with igniting her early love of literature. And it was Ghanaian lore that served as inspiration for Brown’s debut YA fantasy about a refugee boy and a princess whose missions to kill one another give way to unexpected romance.

 



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Ernesto Cisneros

Growing up in Santa Ana, a largely Latinx, working-class Southern California suburb, Ernesto Cisneros showed signs of a literary future. But it was many years before the stars aligned for his first book, Efrén Divided, a middle grade novel about a boy whose mother is deported. “I didn’t want to write a political book,” Cisneros says, “I just wanted to open up the door and invite the world in to meet my family.”



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Leah Johnson

Leah Johnson’s first dream was to be a reporter. By her senior year of journalism school, however, she found that the emotionally taxing work “wasn’t bringing joy anymore.” So she returned to a pastime that gave her happiness as a child: storytelling. Born out of a love of late-’80s and ’90s teen comedies, her debut YA novel, You Should See Me in a Crown, sets out to rewrite the conventional prom queen narrative through main character Liz Lighty, who challenges classism, racism, and queerphobia in her high school.

 



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Jarrett and Jerome Pumphrey

Brothers Jarrett and Jerome Pumphrey found connection in storytelling from a young age. “When we were kids, our dad would tell the best stories,” Jarrett recalls. “Looking back, it seems like my childhood was mostly a series of experiments trying to figure out exactly how to do that in a way that worked for me.” Having co-written and published a picture book in their teens, 17 years later, the siblings have now released their debut as co-author-illustrators, The Old Truck. Jerome believes “different elements of the story resonate,” including “the message of persistence, family, and the strong Black female protagonist.”

 



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Claribel A. Ortega

In Ghost Squad, 12-year-old Lucely Luna is determined to save her home, in part because the ghosts of her extended family, with whom she’s close, manifest as fireflies in the willow tree out back. As debut author Claribel A. Ortega explains, the story is about mourning. “I lost my brother to cancer in 2011, and it was very difficult for me. I was looking for a way to navigate grief.” She also took inspiration from her Dominican heritage and her love of ’80s pop culture to craft the sort of story she’d always wanted to read as a child.

 



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Kelly McWilliams

Though Kelly McWilliams published her first novel in 2004 at age 15, she still considers this spring’s Agnes at the End of the World her debut. The daughter of author Jewell Parker Rhodes, McWilliams says, “I always believed that that’s what women did: we wrote.” The idea for Agnes, the story of a prophetic young woman who finds herself in a pandemic, struck in her 30s when McWilliams was pregnant and living in Hawaii during the Zika virus outbreak. “I realized how quickly life could change because of a public health issue,” she says, bringing to mind the current Covid-19 crisis.



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