JEWISH PUBLIC LIBRARY
Coming in 2023
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nic stone · Sarah mlynowski · Danielle Paige
EK JOHNSTON · adi alsaid · Vikki vansickle brendan kiely · monique polak · gloria chao vicki grant · samira ahmed · Jf Dubeau
sm beiko · chantel guertin · Karl kerschl
aimee friedman · JO treggiari
Sandra gulland · teresa toten
Nic Stone, author of the New York Times bestselling and William C. Morris award finalist DEAR MARTIN and forthcoming ODD ONE OUT, was born and raised in a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia. After graduating from Spelman college, she worked extensively in teen mentoring, and lived in Israel for a few year before returning to the US to write full time. Growing up with a wide range of cultures, religions, and backgrounds, Stone strives to bring these diverse voices and stories to her work.
Sarah Mlynowski is the New York Times bestselling author of the Whatever After series. Sarah was born in Montreal, Canada. After graduating with a degree in English literature from McGill University, she moved to Toronto to work for Harlequin Enterprises. Yup... the romance publisher! While she never met Fabio, she used her romance publishing experiences to fuel her first adult novel. Since then, Sarah has written additional novels for adults; as well as the Magic in Manhattan series, Gimme A Call, Ten Things We Did (And Probably Shouldn't Have) and Don’t Even Think About It for teens. Sarah also enjoys writing with friends. With Farrin Jacobs, Sarah wrote a guide to writing called See Jane Write. With Lauren Myracle and E. Lockhart, Sarah wrote How To Be Bad, and with Lauren Myracle and Emily Jenkins, she wrote the middle-grade series Upside-Down Magic. Sarah also co-edited the collection Girls' Night Out. Sarah's books have been translated into twenty-nine languages and optioned to Hollywood. She now lives in New York City with her husband and two fairy-tale loving daughters. She can be found at www.sarahm.com or pretty much everywhere.
Danielle Paige is the New York Times bestselling author of the Dorothy Must Die series, and the upcoming Stealing Snow series (Bloomsbury, 2016). In addition to writing young adult books, she works in the television industry, where she’s received a Writers Guild of America Award and was nominate d for several Daytime Emmys. She is a graduate of Columbia University and currently lives in New York City. You can find her on twitter and instagram.
E.K. Johnston had several jobs and one vocation before she became a published writer. If she’s learned anything, it’s that things turn out weird sometimes, and there’s not a lot you can do about it. Well, that and how to muscle through awkward fanfic because it’s about a pairing she likes.
Her books range from contemporary fantasy (The Story of Owen, Prairie Fire), to fairy-tale reimaginings (A Thousand Nights, Spindle), and from small town Ontario (Exit, Pursued By A Bear), to a galaxy far, far away (Star Wars: Ahsoka). She has no plans to rein anything in.
Adi Alsaid is the author of several young adult books, including Let's Get Lost, YALSA Best of YA 2015 nominee, and North of Happy, which received a starred review from Kirkus. He was born and raised in Mexico City, where he now lives and spills hot sauce on things.
Vikki VanSickle is the author of Words That Start With B, Love Is a Four-Letter Word, Days That End in Y and Summer Days, Starry Nights, which was nominated for a Red Maple Award. She is an active member of the children’s literature community, presenting at academic conferences, reviewing books, and managing her popular children’s lit blog. Currently, she splits her time between writing and working in marketing and publicity. Vikki lives in Toronto, Ontario.
Brendan Kiely is The New York Times bestselling author of All American Boys (with Jason Reynolds), The Last True Love Story, and The Gospel of Winter. His work has been published in ten languages, received a Coretta Scott King Author Honor Award, the Walter Dean Myers Award, the Amelia Elizabeth Walden Award, and was selected as one of the American Library Association’s Top Ten Best Fiction for Young Adults. Originally from the Boston area, he now lives with his wife in Greenwich Village.
Monique Polak is a writer from Montreal, Quebec. She has published 12 novels for young adults. Her novel What World Is Left won the 2009 Quebec Writers’ Federation Award for Children’s and Young Adult Literature. In 2014 her book Hate Mail won the same prize. A graduate of Marianopolis College in Montreal in 1979, she teaches English and Humanities there since 1983.
Monique is also a freelance journalist. Her articles appear regularly in The Montreal Gazette and other Postmedia newspapers across the country. Several of her feature stories have also been published in Maclean's Magazine.
Gloria Chao is an MIT grad turned dentist turned writer. She currently lives in Chicago with her ever-supportive husband, for whom she became a nine-hole golfer (sometimes seven). She is always up for cooperative board games, Dance Dance Revolution, or soup dumplings. She was also once a black belt in kung-fu and a competitive dancer, but that side of her was drilled and suctioned out. American Panda is her debut novel, and Misaligned is forthcoming fall 2019. Visit her tea-and-book-filled world at gloriachao.wordpress.com and find her on Twitter and Instagram @gloriacchao.
Vicki Grant has been called “a superb storyteller” (The Canadian Children’s Book Centre) and “one of the funniest writers working today” (The Vancouver Sun). She began her career creating ads for Chiat/Day and McCann-Erickson then moved on to writing television scripts for Theodore Tugboat, Big Comfy Couch and her own Gemini Award winning series Scoop & Doozie. Her first middle grade novel, THE PUPPET WRANGLER, was based on her experience in the TV industry. Since then, her novels have won The Red Maple, The Arthur Ellis Award and CBC’s Young Canada Reads as well as been shortlisted for Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Allan Poe Award, the Canadian Library Association's Children’s Book of the Year and numerous Forest of Reading awards. SHORT FOR CHAMELEON, Vicki's Red Maple-nominated comic mystery, has been named a CCBC Best Book for Kids and will soon be published in France. Her latest YA novel, 36 Questions That Changed My Mind About You, has been sold to over 20 territories internationally.
SAMIRA AHMED was born in Bombay, India, and grew up in Batavia, Illinois, in a house that smelled like fried onions, spices, and potpourri. She currently resides in the Midwest. She’s lived in Vermont, New York City, and Kauai, where she spent a year searching for the perfect mango.
A graduate of the University of Chicago, she taught high school English for seven years, worked to create over 70 small high schools in New York City, and fought to secure billions of additional dollars to fairly fund public schools throughout New York State. She’s appeared in the New York Times, New York Daily News, Fox News, NBC, NY1, NPR, and on BBC Radio.
Her creative non-fiction and poetry has appeared in Jaggery Lit, Entropy, the Fem, Claudius Speaks and the Spine Out novelists series. Her debut novel, LOVE, HATE & OTHER FILTERS is out January 16, 2018 from SoHo Teen.
J-F. Dubeau is a Montreal native learning to cope with a crippling addiction to storytelling and long-form narrative. So far, writing seems to be the only treatment. His first book, the Dragon Award–nominated and Sword & Laser Contest–winning The Life Engineered, is an optimistic science-fiction tale of the future published by Sword & Laser (Inkshares). A God in the Shed is Dubeau’s second novel.
Samantha Marie Beiko has been writing and drawing strange, fantastical things since before she can remember. She currently works in the Canadian publishing industry as a freelance editor, graphic designer, and consultant, and is the Co-Publisher of ChiZine Publications, alongside Sandra Kasturi. Her first novel, a young adult fantasy set in rural Manitoba called The Lake and the Library, was nominated for the Manitoba Book Award for Best First Book, as well as the 2014 Aurora Award. Her next series, The Realms of Ancient, has been signed for a three book deal with ECW Press. The first book, The Scion of the Fox, will be out in Fall 2017. The sequels to follow are The Children of the Bloodlands and The Brilliant Dark. Samantha currently resides in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and is the co-chair of the Winnipeg ChiSeries, a reading series that highlights Canadian speculative writers in various panels, readings, and workshops. She apologizes in advance if she suddenly ignores you when a dog walks by.
Chantel Guertin is the bestselling author of the chick lit novels Stuck in Downward Dog and Love Struck, and the YA novel The Rule of Thirds. She's a beauty expert on the Marilyn Denis Show and the editor-at-large of The Kit magazine. She likes roller coasters, notebooks and dressing up her cat, Mr. Baz, on special occasions, like Wednesdays. She also really likes jujubes, but never eats the green ones. She lives in Toronto.
Karl Kerschl is a Canadian comic book artist, best known for his work for DC Comics. His recent projects include Adventures of Superman, Majestic, The Flash (All-Flash #1) and Teen Titans: Year One. He is also the author of the webcomic The Abominable Charles Christopher
Kerschl was born in Toronto and raised in Niagara Falls. He attended the Ontario College of Art for a year before deciding to practice on his own, discovering and improving his own storytelling and drawing styles in the process. Kerschl currently lives in Montreal "with two cats, both of whom are French-Canadian."
Aimee Friedman was born and raised in Queens, New York, in an apartment filled with books and different languages. She wrote her first story at the age of five, and was off and running from there. Aimee wrote all through her years as a student at the Bronx High School of Science and then Vassar College. After graduating from college in 2001, she became a children's book editor, a job she still does, and loves, to this day! Aimee published her first novel, the New York Times bestseller, South Beach, in 2005, and is now the author of several novels for young adults, including Sea Change and Two Summers. Aimee lives in New York City, where she can usually be found writing in cafes, window-shopping, or searching for the perfect iced latte.
Jo Treggiari was born in London, England, and raised in Canada. She spent many years in San Francisco and New York, where she trained as a boxer, wrote for punk magazines and owned a successful gangster rap/indie rock record label. Her bestselling novel, Ashes, Ashes (Scholastic), was a White Pine award nominee, Snow Willow nominee, a Bank Street Best Children’s Books of the Year 2012, and an American Booksellers Association Best Books of 2011. She now lives with her children on Nova Scotia’s gorgeous south shore where she co-owns a carefully curated, community-active bookstore, Lexicon Books.
Sandra Gulland is an American-born Canadian novelist. She is the author of the internationally bestselling trilogy of novels based on the life of Josephine Bonaparte: The Many Lives & Secret Sorrows of Josephine B.; Tales of Passion, Tales of Woe, which was a finalist for the Trillium Award; The Last Great Dance on Earth, as well as two novels set in the court of Louis XIV, the Sun King: The Shadow Queen and Mistress of the Sun. To date, Gulland's novels have been published in nineteen countries and translated into sixteen languages. The Many Lives & Secret Sorrows of Josephine B.was a bestseller in the UK. She divides her time between Ontario and Mexico. The Game of Hope is her first young adult novel.
Teresa Toten is the author of the acclaimed Blondes series. Teresa was twice shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for The Game and Me and The Blondes, and won the Governor General’s Literary Award for The Unlikely Hero of Room 13B. Born in Zagreb, Croatia, but left for Canada on that same day, she lives in Toronto. Her latest book is Beware that Girl.