Michael Cart

Biography

Michael Cart is a writer, a lecturer, a consultant, and a nationally recognized expert in YA literature. He is the former director of the Beverly Hills (California) Public Library and a past president of the Young Adult Library Services Association, and his column "Carte Blanche" appears monthly in Booklist magazine.

He is the author or editor of twenty books, including the gay coming-of-age novel My Father's Scar, an ALA Best Book for Young Adults; From Romance to Realism: 50 Years of Growth and Change in Young Adult Literature; and—with Christine A. Jenkins—The Heart Has Its Reasons, a critical history of young adult literature with gay/lesbian/queer content. His many anthologies include Love and Sex: Ten Stories of Truth, Necessary Noise: Stories About Our Families as They Really Are, and How Beautiful the Ordinary: Twelve Stories of Identity.

In 2008, he became the first recipient of the YALSA/Greenwood Publishing Group Service to Young Adults Achievement Award, and in 2000, he received the Grolier Foundation Award for his contribution to the stimulation and guidance of reading by young people. Mr. Cart lives in Columbus, Indiana.

Francesca Lia Block

Biography

Francesca Lia Block, winner of the prestigious Margaret A. Edwards Award, is the author of many acclaimed and bestselling books, including Weetzie Bat; the book collections Dangerous Angels: The Weetzie Bat Books and Roses and Bones: Myths, Tales, and Secrets; the illustrated novella House of Dolls; the vampire romance novel Pretty Dead; and the gothic werewolf novel The Frenzy. Her work is published around the world.

David Levithan

Biography

David Levithan is the critically acclaimed author of eight books for teens, many of which have appeared on ALA's Best Books for Young Adults list, including Boy Meets Boy, for which he won a Lambda Literary Award.

Ron Koertge

Biography

Christine Heppermann and Ron Koertge are the authors of acclaimed young adult books and are writing for young readers for the first time. After meeting through Hamline University’s MFA program, they decided to collaborate. Christine lives in New York, and Ron lives in California, so they work most of their magic long-distance.

Eric Shanower

Biography

Julie Anne Peters

Biography

Julie Anne Peters lives in Lakewood, Colorado.

Jennifer Finney Boylan

Biography

Jennifer Finney Boylan is the author of more than a dozen books, including a bestselling memoir, a collection of short stories entitled Remind Me to Murder You Later, and three novels for adults. Her novel Getting In won the Alex Award from the American Library Association in 1998 for an adult novel with special appeal to young adult readers. Since 1988 she has been a professor of English at Colby College.

Jenny Boylan lives at the end of a dirt road in Maine with a Sasquatch, a wind elemental, two weredogs, and a leprechaun.

William Sleater

Biography

Emma Donoghue

Biography

Born in Dublin in 1969, EMMA DONOGHUE is a novelist, screenwriter and playwright who lives in Canada. Her novel Room won the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize (Canada and the Caribbean) and was shortlisted for the Man Booker and Orange Prizes as well as the Scotiabank Giller Prize. It sold more than two million copies. Donoghue scripted the Canadian-Irish film Room, which was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Her fiction (short and long) ranges from the contemporary (Stir-Fry, Hood, Landing, Touchy Subjects, Akin) to the historical (Slammerkin, The Sealed Letter, Astray, Frog Music, The Wonder, The Pull of the Stars). Donoghue's books for young readers are The Lotterys Plus One and The Lotterys More Or Less.