Why I Write...

A momentous event in my seventh year started me on a lifelong passion: my grandmother gave me a typewriter. I began to write to understand what I was living.

War Story: PW Profiles Chang-Rae Lee

What stumped Lee in writing The Surrendered is how closely its story touches his own: his father never talked much about his past, and it wasn't until Lee was in college that his father admitted that the war had had terrible effects on his family.

Fall 2009 Flying Starts: Nina LaCour

“It was a surprise for me to end up writing a YA novel, but I'm excited about it,” says Nina LaCour, author of Hold Still, the emotionally charged story of Caitlin, a teen photographer struggling to understand the suicide of Ingrid, her best friend and fellow artist.

Fall 2009 Flying Starts: L.K. Madigan

Like many debut novelists, L.K. (the initials stand for Lisa Kay) Madigan has a day job. Unlike most, hers involves math. She works for a money manager.

Fall 2009 Flying Starts: Lauren Kate

The 28-year-old writer known as Lauren Kate has just published her first two books. The Betrayal of Natalie Hargrove (Razorbill), is about a Texas high school queen bee. Fallen (Delacorte), is the first in a four-book series about two star-crossed lovers—one of whom is a fallen angel. She also learned that Disney has optioned the movie rights to Fallen. And she moved into a new house with her new husband—and changed her last name, from Velevis to Morphew. (Her children's book nom de plume will remain Lauren Kate—her first and middle names.) Phew!

Fall 2009 Flying Starts: Alex Beard

Alex Beard is an artist on a mission. With schools cutting arts funding and what he calls a “schism” between the fine art world and much of the population, Beard wants to encourage kids to embrace creativity in their own lives. And his first book for children, The Jungle Grapevine—a moral fable based on “telephone,” the childhood game of misunderstanding—is just one piece of the puzzle.

Fall 2009 Flying Starts: Malinda Lo

With Ash, 35-year-old Malinda Lo makes her debut as a novelist—and Cinderella makes her debut as a lesbian.

Fall 2009 Flying Starts

Spring 2009 Flying Starts: Thalia Chaltas

Writing came easily for Thalia Chaltas as a child, but it wasn’t until she was in her 30s that she seriously considered being an author. “Reading was my escape as a kid, but I never thought of it as a career path,” says Chaltas, whose novel-in-verse, Because I Am Furniture (Viking) is narrated by teenager Anke, whose father is abusing her siblings.

Spring 2009 Flying Starts: Michael Northrop

Michael Northrop may share his first name with the narrator of his debut novel, Gentlemen (Scholastic Press), but don’t think that character is a stand-in for the author. “That was a bit of a trick on my part," he says. “Everyone is always asking that question”--was this what high school was like for you?--“so I decided to turn the dial up on that, to increase that impulse,” he says.

Spring 2009 Flying Starts: Rosanne Parry

Unlike many authors, writing wasn’t a favorite childhood pastime for Rosanne Parry. “I had terrible handwriting and was a terrible speller,” she recalls. “I didn’t love writing, but I always loved making things up.” One book she read over and over was From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. “I remember how satisfying it was to read about kids going off on their own and having an adventure. And later, as a camp counselor, a teacher and a parent, I came to see the unique power that stories have to keep kids’ attention.”

Spring 2009 Flying Starts: Jacqueline Kelly

The first line of her first novel came to Jacqueline Kelly as she was suffering through a particularly oppressive summer in her century-old farm house, 40 miles south of Austin, Tex.: “By 1899, we had learned to tame the darkness but not the Texas heat.”

Spring 2009 Flying Starts

This spring saw many strong children’s book debuts, but for our semiannual Flying Starts, which highlight standout first books, we narrowed the field to four. The novels we selected feature a girl who embraces science one stifling summer in 1899 Texas; a boy coming of age in rural Oregon against the backdrop of war; a group of delinquent teenage boys investigating the disappearance of a friend; and a family quietly suffering an abusive father.

Fall 2008 Flying Starts: Marie Rutkoski

A lifelong bookworm, Marie Rutkoski always wanted to write a book of her own, but discouraged by her attempts at fiction, she focused on academic success instead. Then in 2006, just as she was finishing her Ph.D. in English from Harvard, studying Renaissance children with reported special powers such as the ability to breathe fire, she got the idea for The Cabinet of Wonders (FSG).

Fall 2008 Flying Starts

This past season saw a bumper crop of first novels. We spoke with the authors of three standouts: a riveting fantasy about a girl “graced” with the skill of killing, a tale of a 16th-century clockmaker's daughter who attempts to retrieve her father's enchanted eyes, and a coming-of-age story about a teen who petitions the Vatican to make her a saint.

Fall 2008 Flying Starts: Donna Freitas

As a professor of religion at Boston University, Donna Freitas (pronounced FRAY-tis) does a lot of writing—essays, articles, nonfiction—but what she most likes to read are children's books. She uses The Giver, Skellig and Tuck Everlasting as “core texts” in her undergraduate classes because they get her students thinking and talking about life's Big Questions.

Fall 2008 Flying Starts: Kristin Cashore

The author of Graceling (Harcourt) is nothing like her heroine, Katsa, whose mixed eye color (one is blue and the other green) signifies in her particular world that she is “graced,” born with a unique skill. Katsa's grace is for killing.

The Hemingses: First Family of Slavery

Annette Gordon-Reed has completed a massive new work, 'The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family '(W.W. Norton, Sept.) that promises to transform not only the study of Thomas Jefferson's life but also how Americans look at racial identity.

Spring 2008 Flying Starts: Padma Venkatraman

Padma Venkatraman is a woman of many talents and passions. A lover of science, math, history and literature, she always wanted to be a writer but felt there was more financial security in following a different path. At age 19, she moved from India to the United States to attend graduate school at the College of William and Mary School of Marine Science, and she is currently a professor of oceanography at University of Rhode Island.

Spring 2008 Flying Starts: Stephanie Bodeen

The Compound was not the first young adult book Stephanie Bodeen wrote. In fact it was her 10th. But although she had published picture books before, she had yet to sell a YA novel. In fact, Bodeen had pretty much decided to quit trying after her agent returned a box of manuscripts to her, telling her they were unsaleable. But then she made another decision. “I decided I'm either a writer or I'm not a writer, so I signed up for National Novel Writing Month and on November 1, I started a young adult novel,” she recalls.