“When I learned [what authors were], I remember thinking, “Wow, that must be the coolest job in the world.” — David A. Poulsen, author for youths   Posted May 2, 2025 David A. Poulsen, a writer/broadcaster in Alberta, Canada, has written 31 books over the past 41 years, garnering innumerable awards. Roughly two thirds of his books are for young readers, while others include adult mysteries, sports biographies and even a cowboy cookbook. Among his best-known youth novels are Last Sam’s Cage, And Then the Sky Exploded and Numbers (winner of Japan’s Sakura Medal). His young-adult mystery/thriller The Dark Won’t […]

“Windows into lives nothing like our own are important.” – young-adult author T.L. Simpson   Posted March 7, 2025 T.L. Simpson is author of two young-adult (YA) novels: Strong Like You and Cope Field (both Flux/North Star Editions, 2024 and 2025 respectively). He is also an award-winning journalist and editor of Russellville, Arkansas’s The Courier. His gritty writing on rural poverty, sports and boys’ anger and confusion has been called “unflinching, insightful and gut-wrenching,” “perfectly conceived and executed” and “powerful, sparse, poetic prose.” He has been compared with Louise Finch, Lewis Hancox, Anthony McGowan and G. Neri, and his subject […]

  Posted January 3, 2025 Anton Treuer of Bemidji, Minnesota is a professor of Ojibwe who has written or edited more than 20 nonfiction books for adults, emphasizing history and American Indian studies. These include Everything You Wanted to Know About Indians but Were Afraid to Ask and Atlas of Indian Nations. Now he has written a first novel, Where Wolves Don’t Die (Levine Querido 2024), “a taut thriller and a raw, tender coming-of-age story, about one Ojibwe boy learning to love himself through the love of his family around him.” Anton has won more than 40 prestigious awards and […]

  Tom Birdseye grew up in North Carolina and Kentucky, where he enjoyed sports and outdoor fun. He wasn’t into reading until age 19, when a friend shoved a book in his face and said, “You’ve got to read this, no excuses.” It was The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien. By the bottom of page one he was hooked. After attaining university degrees in mass communications and elementary education, Tom taught fifth grade, lived a year in Japan teaching English as a second language, and graduated to teaching kindergarten (“kinda’ like herding cats”) until he published his first book at age […]

  Tomi Oyemakinde grew up in London, UK before being uprooted at the age of six to the Netherlands, then Kuwait, Norway and Scandinavia. The child of Nigerian immigrants, he considers himself a “third culture kid.” While attending a boarding school in England, he developed a passion for fantasy stories, influenced initially by Richard Adam’s Watership Down. At one stage, Tomi aspired to be a rapper, but studied electrical and electronic engineering at City University of London, then pursued a greater love for stories and a desire to write. Although he found that finishing a piece was a lot harder […]