The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project: Ray Stoeve
“You can’t fake knowledge of zip zap zup.”
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Posts Tagged: YA
Rumpus Exclusive: “Kristy’s Invisible Hand and Das Baby-Sitters Club Kapital”
The babysitters inspired me, and Kristy’s entrepreneurial vision seemed plain yet elegant; easy-to-follow, too.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project: Robin Gow
“I always knew I wanted to write a queer saint holy book.”
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Rumpus Exclusive: Cover Reveal for Up All Night
An exclusive look at the cover of the forthcoming anthology, UP ALL NIGHT.
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Rumpus Exclusive: Cover Reveal for Foreshadow
An exclusive first look at the cover of the forthcoming collection, FORESHADOW!
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Off the Grid: Talking with Jamie Beth Cohen
Jamie Beth Cohen discusses her debut novel, WASTED PRETTY.
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Both Hard and Soft: Talking with Lilliam Rivera
Lilliam Rivera discusses her new novel, DEALING IN DREAMS.
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Smart Girls, Weird Magic: Talking with Kendra Fortmeyer
Kendra Fortmeyer discusses her first novel, HOLE IN THE MIDDLE.
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Living in the Fulcrum: A Conversation with Mary H.K. Choi
Mary H.K. Choi discusses her debut YA novel, Emergency Contact, her versatile writing career, and writing diverse Korean-American characters.
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VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color: Bethany C. Morrow
Bethany C. Morrow discusses her debut novel, MEM, how it felt to read Toni Morrison for the first time, and her hope for Black girl readers.
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Sound & Vision: Celia C. Pérez
Allyson McCabe talks with Celia C. Pérez about her debut middle-grade novel, The First Rule of Punk, her inspirations for writing the book, and her own childhood.
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Young People Are Our Hope: Talking with Lilliam Rivera
Lilliam Rivera discusses her debut novel, The Education of Margot Sanchez, world-building, and her desire to see bookshelves filled with stories by people of color.
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VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color: Erika T. Wurth
Erika T. Wurth talks about her latest book, Buckskin Cocaine, persevering through rejection, and white writers writing Native characters.
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On Searching for Honesty in Writing: An Interview with Blake Nelson
Blake Nelson discusses his new book, Boy, letting his characters find their own fates, and possibly, maybe, being just the right amount of famous.
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A Poethead’s Guide to the Galaxy: Talking with David Hernandez
David Hernandez discusses his most recent poetry collection, Dear, Sincerely, working across multiple genres, and why the act of making anything is a kind of optimism.
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What to Read When You Are a Girl in This Garbage-Fire World
Our voices are our weapons, and in these books, young women speak, shout, and scream the truths that you are not alone, you are not forgotten, and you are not done fighting.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #66: Reimagining Children’s Literature as Mixtape
In the best collaborations, creative individuals push themselves to work with new media and singular, wild things issue forth. Jeff Antebi of Waxploitation Records has managed to create just this kind of magic in his book, Stories for Ways and Means. A product of ten years’ worth of seeking and story pitching, Stories for Ways […]
...moreReading YA Lit as an Act of Resistance
These and many other stories hope to remind us that the freedom to choose our own reading is a form of resistance against the looming threat of a totalitarian state… YA literature has situated itself as one of the most influential genres in publishing, with more adults reading YA than ever, and young adults being the most “literate” […]
...moreWhere Our Favorite Stories Lived
Particularly in the case of children’s writers, some part of me might hope that these tourist sites will be living manifestations of beloved stories, of stories that seemed like physical locations, places to escape, as real as real life. Maybe it has something to do with seeking to make literal the metaphorical experience of being […]
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
What’s a witch? Green skin, warts, and broomsticks? A hag bent over a foul, steaming cauldron? A cold-blooded queen in a wardrobe? One thing’s for certain: witches are feared and powerful. And they’re women. Maybe being a witch isn’t so bad after all. In a new story, “Nights in the Forest,” at the YA lit mag […]
...moreOld Friends
Upbeat YA protagonists are a far cry from the tortured figures we’re used to watching on television. Flavorwire’s Sarah Seltzer makes her predictions for Nancy Drew and Anne of Green Gables’s forthcoming return to the small screen: Two iconic characters with sunny auras and relatively straightforward histories are about to be reimagined in the context of today’s […]
...moreYA’s Last Taboo
Sex scenes in YA, the kind that (gulp) turn us on and make our cheeks flush and get our hearts racing, have never been more important than they are now. Stories that give protagonists flesh and bone and heart and all that goes with being in a body also give us a portrait of sexual […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Maxwell Neely-Cohen
Maxwell Neely-Cohen discusses smart teens, furious parents, the apocalypse, and how our screens change how we see the world.
...moreAre YA Dystopian Novels Breeding Conservatives?
The Harry Potter series might have been helping make young kids more open and accepting of diversity, but a new crop of young adult novels might be push kids in the opposite direction of the political spectrum. Heroines like Katniss Everdeen and Tris Prior aren’t just strong women–they’re exceptionally special people oppressed by nanny states […]
...moreThe Women of YA
S.E. Hinton, a woman, arguably pioneered the young adult genre of literature. So why is it that women are seen as secondary in this genre, and as less valuable as their male counterparts? Book Riot explores this question, and the powerful effects that narratives written for young women can have. Within the pages of these […]
...moreThe Whiteness of BookCon
This year’s BookCon is facing a lot of heat for the lack of diversity in their speakers. BookRiot feels that popular YA author (and one of BookCon’s speakers this year) John Green needs to speak up about the controversy flying around him. If you’re going to be called a prophet, eventually someone’s going to expect […]
...moreQueer Characters of Color in YA Novels
As a queer woman of color who writes young-adult fiction, Malinda Lo “was a little bit taken aback by the sheer paucity of books I could find about queer characters of color.” If you, too, have been seeking those sorts of books without much success, look no further: Lo has compiled a list, which, though […]
...moreNext Letter for Kids: Michael Reisman
The next Letter for Kids, going out Monday, July 15, is from Michael Reisman! Born and raised in New Jersey, Michael worked all kinds of jobs, from dishwasher at a pizzeria to assistant for Tom Hanks, before settling on young-adult author. He just concluded his Simon Bloom series with the electrifying Simon Bloom: The Order of Chaos and […]
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