16 YA Authors Who Built Their Careers in Libraries

From SLJ:

We know that many teachers have become writers for young people, and librarians are no different. Beverly Cleary and Lewis Carroll both spent their days in information services, and many contemporary YA authors also have experience in school, public, and academic libraries. And between gaining research experience, developing knowledge of the publishing market, and having conversations with teens, their careers inform their writing. Below are 16 YA authors Who Built Their Careers in Libraries. Their work is both in the stacks and behind the reference desk.

Finding—and writing—what teens are looking for

As the young adult librarian at the Morristown and Morris Township library in Morristown, NJ, Sandy Hall ran teen programming and was in charge of YA collection development. She was also a reader for the Garden State Teen Book Awards. Hall’s first novel, A Little Something Different, was inspired by one of the teens in her library. “She wanted to read a book about living away at college. We couldn't find anything quite like what she was looking for and I filed the idea away,” she says.

The author’s next YA romance, The Shortest Distance Between Love and Hate,comes out in July. Even while writing, Hall is never far from libraries. “I currently work part-time as a reference librarian because I love being a librarian and didn't want to give up the profession completely.”

To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before author Jenny Han worked with middle and upper school students in the library at the Calhoun School in New York City, where she bought books and coordinated programming like school visits with Rebecca Stead and Gene Luen Yang. That’s all while publishing her first middle grade and YA novels, including Shug and The Summer I Turned Pretty.

“My own books were coming out the entire time I was a librarian, and I was so fortunate to have a supportive and generous library director in Jenna Lanterman,” she says. “She was flexible about my schedule, and she always said my book career should come first.”

When Kelly Jensen worked in youth and teen services in Illinois and Wisconsin, she became exhausted by the heavy nonfiction tomes that were being published for teens. “I'd just had another frustrating vendor meeting where I was being shown all of these books that looked so boring to me, and I realized there was a massive hole in the nonfiction side of YA literature,” she says.

“Good, interesting reads for both the casual reader who likes nonfiction, as well as books that would be perfect for school assignments but not feel like they were work to read. Those books have their place, but they shouldn't be the main course of what YA nonfiction is.” Since then, Jensen has taken matters into her own hands, publishing two nonfiction YA anthologies,

Here We Are: Feminism for the Real World and (Don't) Call Me Crazy: 33 Voices Start the Conversation about Mental Health. “I'm constantly reading and talking about YA nonfiction, and it's nice to not only be part of this growing area, but to also know that librarians have way more choices when it comes to filling their nonfiction shelves for teens and that teens have so much more depth and choice,” she says. “I know teens will read adult books, but there is real value in offering something to them, for them.”

Read on to read about the rest of the 16 YA Authors Who Built Their Careers in Libraries on School Library Journal.

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