Sara Zarr

"Expert advice and encouragement are paired with exercises to help you face down your fears, let go of expectations, stop comparing yourself to others, and make your art with courage"--

Gem has never known what it is to have security. She's never known an adult she can truly rely on. But the one constant in her life has been Dixie. Gem grew up taking care of her sister when no one else could: not their mother, whose issues make it hard for her to keep food on the table, and definitely not their father, whose intermittent presence is the only thing worse than his frequent absence. Even as Gem and Dixie have grown apart, they've always...

After losing her soul mate, Cameron, when they were nine, Jennifer, now seventeen, transformed herself from the unpopular fat girl into the beautiful and popular Jenna, but Cameron's unexpected return dredges up memories that cause both social and emotional turmoil.

While living very different lives on opposite coasts, seventeen-year-old Elizabeth and eighteen-year-old Lauren become acquainted by email the summer before they begin rooming together as freshmen at UC-Berkeley.

There are a lot of books about writing out there. If you're like most writers, you've read them all. But learning how to write (and organize and outline and plot and edit and save the cat and market a breakout book) is one thing. Making and living a sustainable creative life in the face of...everything...is an entirely different matter. To know how to do that, we need to take a look at what goes on between the lines of our lives as writers so that...

Thirty-one young adult authors share their own struggles with mental illness, ranging from such topics as neurodiversity and addiction to OCD and PTSD.