Alaya Dawn Johnson

Author Steven Barnes vividly remembers attending science fiction conventions when he first started in the field 30 years ago: "For almost 20 years, as far as I could tell, I was the only black male science fiction writer in the world," he says. The legendary Samuel R. Delany, ...

Jason Reynolds' debut When I Was the Greatest put him on the radar of many YA readers looking for fresh new voices. His latest, The Boy in the Black Suit, begins in a place we've seen before: the senior lockers, the first day back at high school.

Narrator Matt Miller ...

The old fiction room at my high school was a small box of wonders, and no matter how long I spent investigating its seven and a half overstuffed shelves, I never stopped discovering treasures. When I was sixteen, the shelf which held authors A through D divulged a small, yellowing ...

It is always an interesting — and sometimes fraught — endeavor for a writer of a classic, well-loved series to return to that world after decades away. Sabriel, the first volume in Garth Nix's Old Kingdom series, helped to pioneer the renaissance of YA fantasy 19 years ago.

I read ...

Editor's Note: This book review includes a passage in which a racial slur is used. The word is key to understanding the point the author is making.

In the spring of 1968, my aunt Elizabeth Rice was about to start her first term as a teacher at Virginia's Petersburg ...

I have a friend whose parents died when she was a teenager, leaving her the house. They had been sick for a long time, and so the accumulation of stuff that generally accompanies any suburban existence was traumatically amplified: the dining room had two sets of furniture, the living room ...

This week, the CDC predicted there could be tens of thousands of Ebola cases if the disease is not controlled soon. Author Alaya Dawn Johnson turns to a favorite novel for wisdom amid this epidemic.