YA A to Z: An Alphabet Soup of YA Authors – the list

Sometime this summer I sent out an email to my TLTers and said, “so . . . I have this idea, what to do you think of this?” And my idea was YA A to Z. As Robin once said, “you have good ideas, you just don’t have small ideas.” And YA A to Z turned out to be a rather big idea. But we did it! During the month of November we put together an A to Z list of some of our favorite YA authors and highlighted the books that touched us as both readers and librarians. Many people shared in the fun online by sharing their favorite authors with the hashtag #YAAtoZ. It was a lot of fun, and even I found some new titles and authors I wasn’t familiar with, making my TBR list that much bigger.

Here’s our alphabet soup of YA authors

A: Laure Halse Anderson

B: Libba Bray

C: Kristin Cashore

D: Sarah Dessen

E: E. Lockhart

F: Sharon G. Flake

G: Lamar Giles

H: Rachel Hawkins

I: Justina Ireland

J: Maureen Johnson

K: Julie Kagawa

L: David Levithan

M: Tahereh Mafi

N: Patrick Ness

O: Laruen Oliver

P: Stephanie Perkins

Q: Matthew Quick

R: Sarah Rees Brennan

S: Jenny Torres Sanchez

T: Terry Trueman

U: Anne Ursu

V: Siobhan Vivian

W: Jacqueline Woodson

X: Francisco X. Stork

Y: Gene Luen Yang

Z: Sara Zarr

As you can see, we cheated on about 5 of the letters. And on some of them, we were forced to make some really hard decisions choosing between several of our favorites. When this happened, we chose to highlight authors that we had talked about less on the blog. The planning process was part of the fun – there was debating, there was bargaining, there was weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. We wanted to heed the call put forth by the #WeNeedDiverseBooks campaign to include diversity. We wanted to share our experiences and highlight those moments that had touched us. In short, we want to share our love of all things YA lit. And I think we accomplished what we set out to do. If we did this a year from now – and don’t panic Heather, Robin and Amanda, we probably aren’t – I am sure we would come up with a completely different list. Because trying to choose a favorite is a really hard thing to do it turns out.

This is by no means a comprehensive list of YA authors, but it was a fun exercise for us in sharing some of our favorites. Please, feel free to share your favorites with us in the comments. We love to talk about YA authors and books and we want to hear from you.

Filed under: YA A to Z