Hi everybody. I just had the lovely surprise of learning that True Biz won an American Library Association Alex Award. The awards are given to ten books written for adults that “have a special appeal to young adults.” Thank you ALA and YALSA! All hail the hero librarians!

Girl at War, told half when the main character is 10 years old, and half when she is 20, also won this award in 2016.

People often ask me why I write about children. Mostly they want to know why, if I am writing about children, I’m not writing YA. I think the answer is probably the same for both questions—I believe adults have a lot to learn from kids, and teenagers in particular. One of the (adult) characters in True Biz, February, has this theory—which, shocker! is also my theory—about teens: they get a bad rap in part because they are going through a developmental stage where the language they have for processing the world, their feelings, and what’s happening to their bodies is wildly inadequate for the job. A second-wave terrible-twos, is one way of thinking about it. But what’s fascinating about teenagers is that instead of screaming, (or instead of only screaming) they have the power to work around the missing words and make something new. This, to me, is where all art begins.