As part of our Mind the Middle project focusing on middle grade books, I’m going to try to do weekly Take Five lists, which is to say, five books on a certain theme.  These Take Five lists can help you with collection development, displays, reading lists, and more. I have a pretty giant list of potential Take Five themes, but if there’s something you’re desperate for a list for, let me know! All descriptions come from the publishers. Today’s list doesn’t have a really neat, tidy name. It includes anthologies, connected stories by various authors, and short stories. These books ..read more

When I first considered writing a young adult novel that tackled the impact of COVID, I wasn’t quite sure how to frame it. With so few books mentioning the pandemic, it felt like uncharted territory. However, I knew that I wanted to highlight this aspect of what it’s like to be disabled in a world that isn’t designed for people like me. In Conditions of a Heart, the main character Brynn hides her disability from her closest friends and especially from her ex-boyfriend, Oliver. After seeing how people reacted to the thought of getting sick during the pandemic, she doesn’t believe anyone will t ..read more

You know what is a terrible term? Sandwich Generation. Because I like sandwiches, but I for sure do NOT like being part of the Sandwich Generation. Yes, this is related to this post. Bear with me. This post has LOTS of post-it reviews because I have spent LOTS of time at my mom’s helping care for her post-surgery. The only upside to missing work and being gone is that at her house I’ve had lots of time to read, thus the many small reviews here. The 50% of the time I’m not at her house, I’m at work, or busy being President of Everything at home, or filling out the endless forms that have alrea ..read more

Just like the kids in my middle grade debut, Team Canteen 1: Rocky Road, I was not even a little bit popular in seventh grade. Completely ignorant of the cruel reality of the tween hierarchy, I ran for student government secretary that year, fully believing I could win. Of course, I lost spectacularly.  After that failure, I tried for years to fit in with the kids everyone else voted for. To squish myself into someone else’s mold of what it was to be cool. I spent all my babysitting earnings on clothes that didn’t fit me from the name-brand stores I couldn’t afford. I listened to music I ..read more

“We’re here” burns like a fire inside me. Those two words became my battle cry at the beginning of 2022. That was when I started writing what would become my debut YA novel, The Last Boyfriends Rules for Revenge, about queer teens in a rural Alabama town who deal with heartbreak. However, as I was writing, Florida HB 1557, known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, began targeting my community. I felt helpless, swallowed by the darkness of grief. So I did the only thing I could control and turned to the blinking cursor on my manuscript document in search of joy, of light to guide me through. It was a ..read more

I often talk about how my work as an actor feeds into my writing and vice versa. Even my first series, The Forge & Fracture Saga, is infused with theatre. This isn’t purely a blending of my two professions. It’s also how I became the writer and storyteller that I am today. My drama teachers and librarians growing up helped set stories in my bones but it was specifically my Black teachers and librarians who made sure I could write myself as a protagonist. I attended three different schools as a child: a public, majority-Black elementary school; a Catholic, majority-Black middle school; and ..read more

I spent the last five years writing a Young Adult biography of Jane Jacobs, the activist, public intellectual, and urbanist. Jane Jacobs was born more than a hundred years ago, yet the ideas she popularized — about cities, about people, about creating a more equitable world — remain hugely relevant today. Jane’s legacy will be celebrated in just a few short weeks as people gather together on her birthday in cities around the world to learn about their place’s history and culture. In the spirit of Jane’s Walk, this annual international event, I’m thinking about community connection. I’m imagin ..read more

I’m seven. I rip out a page of a coloring book because I went outside the lines. I’m ten. I forget a permission slip for a field trip on the day it’s due and hyperventilate. I’m fourteen. It’s two a.m. and I’m still doing homework, painstaking coloring in a poster for the science fair. I’m sixteen and I fall. I’m on stage at a dance competition and I prep for a double pirouette. It’s a basic turn, a move that I’ve executed effortlessly more times than I can count. But this time, on a stage, where I am a part of a team that is being judged . . . my ankle gives out. I fall. My instructor assure ..read more

My mission is to create stories that teens can see themselves in and be entertained by so I can help them find a way through life despite what may have happened to them so far. I grew up in a time before the great Young Adult Literature Renaissance of the late 1990s and early 2000s. While many critics and bibliophiles believe this surge of creativity in YA books occurred in the 70s, or even the 60s, I’m here to say that looking for books to read in the late 80s when I was a teen led me to a scant number of titles I found interesting. One of my biggest life-changing moments wasn’t even my mome ..read more

Riley will turn 22 this year. She is the reason we are Taylor Swift fans in our house. Taylor launched right around the time that Riley started listening to music. And I have raised 2 daughters now with Taylor Swift as the soundtrack of our lives. Swifties from a young age, Sisters forever On Friday, Taylor Swift released her 11th album, The Tortured Poets Department. On Friday night, Thing 2, age 15, came home and we ordered pizza and we sat around listening to the album. Let me start by saying, I love this album. Love it. As my girls and I mature, so does our music and it seems to capture t ..read more