Speak, published in 1999, is a young adult novel by Laurie Halse Anderson that tells the story of high school freshman Melinda Sordino. After Melinda is raped at an end of summer party, she calls the police, who break up the party. Melinda is then ostracized by her peers because she will not say why she called the police. Unable to verbalize what happened, Melinda nearly stops speaking altogether, expressing her voice through the art she produces for Mr. Freeman's class. This expression slowly helps Melinda acknowledge what happened, face her problems, and recreate her identity.
Young adult fiction (YA) is fiction written for readers from 12 to 18 years of age. The term YA was first used regularly in the 1960s in the United States. The YA category includes most of the genres found in adult fiction, with themes that include friendship, sexuality, drugs and alcohol, and sexual and gender identity. Stories that focus on the challenges of youth may be categorized as problem novels or coming-of-age novels. The boundary between children's and adult literature is flexible, subject to moral and political ideology, and in some cases meaningless.
Laurie Halse Anderson is an American writer, known for children's and young adult novels. She received the Margaret A. Edwards Award from the American Library Association in 2010 for her contribution to young adult literature and 2023 she received the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award.
Ann K. Powers is an American writer and popular music critic. She is a music critic for NPR and a contributor at the Los Angeles Times, where she was previously chief pop critic. She has also written for other publications, such as The New York Times, Blender and The Village Voice. Powers is the author of Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America, a memoir; Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black & White, Body and Soul in American Music, on eroticism in American pop music; and Piece by Piece, co-authored with Tori Amos.
Bag of Bones is a 1998 horror novel by American writer Stephen King. It focuses on an author who suffers severe writer's block and delusions at an isolated lake house four years after the death of his wife. It won the 1999 Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel, the 1999 British Fantasy Award for Best Novel, and the 1999 Locus Award for Best Dark Fantasy/Horror Novel. The book re-uses many basic plot elements of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, which is directly referenced several times in the book's opening pages; however, the relation of these elements to the plot and characters is markedly different. When the paperback edition of Bag of Bones was published by Pocket Books on June 1, 1999 (ISBN 978-0671024239), it included a new author's note at the end of the book, in which Stephen King describes his initial three-book deal with Scribner, and devotes most of the piece describing the origins of the then-forthcoming Hearts in Atlantis.
Urban fiction, also known as street lit or street fiction, is a literary genre set in a city landscape; however, the genre is as much defined by the socio-economic realities and culture of its characters as the urban setting. The tone for urban fiction is usually dark, focusing on the underside of city living. Profanity, sex, and violence are usually explicit, with the writer not shying away from or watering-down the material. Most authors of this genre draw upon their past experiences to depict their storylines.
Mary Elizabeth Pipher, also known as Mary Bray Pipher, is an American clinical psychologist and author. Her books include A Life in Light: Meditations on Impermanence (2022) and Women Rowing North (2019), a book on aging gracefully. Prior to that, she wrote The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture (2013) and the bestseller Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls (1994).
Edison Price Vizzini was an American writer. He was the author of four books for young adults including It's Kind of a Funny Story, which NPR named #56 of the "100 Best-Ever Teen Novels" and which is the basis of the film of the same name.
Jason Elliot is a British travel writer and novelist. He had written about his journeys through Afghanistan, once at 19 and again, as described in the book, An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan, for which he received the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award in 2000 and the ALA Notable Books for Adults in 2002. His second book was on his travels through Iran, in the book, Mirrors of the Unseen: Journeys in Iran, which was published in 2006. Four years later, his first novel The Network was published.
Jacqueline Woodson is an American writer of books for children and adolescents. She is best known for Miracle's Boys, and her Newbery Honor-winning titles Brown Girl Dreaming, After Tupac and D Foster, Feathers, and Show Way. After serving as the Young People's Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2017, she was named the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, by the Library of Congress, for 2018 to 2019. She won the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award in 2018. She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2020.
Anna Benjamin David is an American publisher, author, speaker, podcast host, and television personality.
Romiette and Julio is a young adult novel by Sharon Draper, published in 1999 by Atheneum Books. It is an updated version of Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare. Many of the characters in Draper's novel closely parallel those in Shakespeare's play. The plot updates the family feud between the Capulets and Montagues to reflect modern racial tensions between African-Americans and Hispanics in the United States. The book received mixed reviews.
Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls is a 1994 book written by Mary Pipher. This book takes a look at the effects of societal pressures on American adolescent girls, and utilizes many case studies from the author's experience as a therapist. The book has been described as a "call to arms" and highlights the increased levels of sexism and violence that affect young females. Pipher asserts that whilst the feminist movement has aided adult women to become empowered, teenagers have been neglected and require intensive support due to their undeveloped maturity.
Emily Carmichael is an American film director, screenwriter, and animator. Her short films have screened in competition at Sundance, Tribeca, SXSW, Slamdance, and other US and International film festivals. Carmichael co-wrote the screenplay for the 2018 science fiction sequel Pacific Rim: Uprising and the 2022 film Jurassic World: Dominion.
Myra MacPherson is an American author, biographer, and journalist known for writing about politics, the Vietnam War, feminism, and death and dying. Although her work has appeared in many publications, she had a long affiliation with The Washington Post newspaper. She was hired in 1968 by Post executive editor Ben Bradlee to write for the paper's Style section, and remained with the Post for over two decades until 1991. While with the title, she profiled those involved in Watergate, covered five presidential campaigns, women's rights issues and wrote a series on Vietnam veterans that led to her 1984 book Long Time Passing: Vietnam and the Haunted Generation. It was the first trade book to examine post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and, according to Vietnam expert Arnold R. Isaacs, one of the first to "break the long national silence" about the war and remains one of the most moving and important works on the Vietnam bookshelf." The author Joseph Heller wrote: "MacPherson's book belongs with the best of the works on Vietnam."
Diary of a Short-Sighted Adolescent is a novel by the Romanian writer Mircea Eliade. It is based on Eliade's time in high-school and tells the story of a precocious teenager with literary ambitions. The book was written in the 1920s when Eliade was still a teenager. It was discovered after the author's death and published in 1989 in Romania. An English translation was published in 2016 in the UK.
Ophelia's Mom: Women Speak Out About Loving and Letting Go of Their Adolescent Daughters is a 2001 book written by Nina Shandler and published by Crown Publishing Group.
Jason Reynolds is an American author of novels and poetry for young adult and middle-grade audience. Born in Washington, D.C., and raised in neighboring Oxon Hill, Maryland, Reynolds found inspiration in rap and had an early focus on poetry, publishing several poetry collections before his first novel in 2014, When I Was The Greatest, which won the John Steptoe Award for New Talent.
Lisa Kendall Damour is an American clinical psychologist and author specializing in the development of teenage girls and young women.
Gurl.com was an American website for teenage girls that was online from 1996 to 2018. It was created by Rebecca Odes, Esther Drill, and Heather McDonald as a resource centered on teen advice, body image, female sexuality, and other teen-related concerns. First published as an online zine, it later expanded into an online community. At one point, it provided a free e-mail and web hosting service, known as Gurlmail and Gurlpages respectively.
