I had the pleasure of interviewing SHINE, COCONUT MOON debut author Neesha Meminger recently -- please do check it out!

The PEN Children's/Young Adult Book Author Committee page is chock full of all kinds of interesting goodness, like a correspondence between Markus Zusak and Susan Campbell Bartoletti, archived audio such as Leaving Home as a Rite of Passage with Neil Gaiman, Isabel Hoving, Janne Teller, Markus Zusak, and moderated by Robert Lipsyte; and Crossing ( Read more... )

New post up on AuthorsNow!; please share your 'book that changed everything' in the comments. Thanks so much to everyone who supplied such fantastic anecdotes.

Glossy promotional campaigns, bestseller lists everywhere, that indefinable buzz that skyrockets a book to the forefront of our collective imagination - we’re inundated with hard sells these days, often for the same few titles. How do you offer readers books beyond the bestsellers? How do you find the ones that will resonate with you and the people ( Read more... )

So I was walking down the street thinking about something that was really upsetting, quite painful...and within seconds, I was wondering how I might use it in a story. In a way, that's not anything new at all, using people, places, and things from my life in writing (and I'm pretty sure it's not just me -- I mean, that's kind of what we do, right ( Read more... )

"I'm YA and I'm OK", Margo Rabb's piece in the NY Times