YAx6

 

Sona Charaipotra and Dhonielle Clayton are the coauthors of Tiny Pretty Things. The two met while attending the New School's acclaimed Writing for Children MFA program. Sona is a journalist who has written for the New York Times, People, Parade, Cosmopolitan, and other major media. Dhonielle is a librarian at a middle school in Harlem and taught English at a cutthroat ballet academy. Together, the pair cofounded CAKE Literary, a boutique book packaging company with a decidedly diverse bent.

Kody Keplinger wrote her first novel, The DUFF, which was recently made into a major motion picture, during her senior year of high school. Her most recent novel, Lying Out Loud, is a companion to The DUFF.  She is the cofounder of Disability in Kidlit, a website devoted to the representation of disability in children's literature. Currently, Kody lives in New York City, where she teaches writing workshops and continues to write books for kids and teens.

Erica O'Rourke's debut novel, Torn, won the Romance Writers of America's 2010 Golden Heart Award for Best Young Adult Manuscript, and was the launch title for Kensington Books' KTeen imprint. Also available from Erica in The Torn Trilogy are Tangled and Bound. Her latest series, Dissonance, is about a girl with the ability to walk between alternate realities, who falls for different versions of the same boy in every world she visits. Erica lives outside of Chicago with her family. 

Sara Polsky is a writer and features editor at Curbed, and her articles and essays have appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, The Forward, Poets & Writers, and other publications. Her debut YA novel, This Is How I Find Her, was published by Albert Whitman and named a Bank Street Best Children’s Book of 2014. She lives in Queens, New York.

Suzanne Young  is the New York Times bestselling author of The Program series, which includes The Program, The Treatment, and The Remedy. Originally from Utica, New York, Suzanne moved to Arizona to pursue her dream of not freezing to death. She is a novelist and an English teacher, but not always in that order.