LILY ANDERSON is the Printz-Honor winning author of several novels, including SCOUT’S HONOR, UNDEAD GIRL GANG, and THE ONLY THING WORSE THAN ME IS YOU. A former school librarian, she is deeply devoted to Shakespeare, fairy tales, and podcasts. Somewhere in Northern California, she is expressing strong opinions on musical theater.

The Less Formal Version: I’m Lily, the curly haired gal in the pictures. I grew up in the hilly slice of suburbs between Sacramento and San Francisco not cool enough to be the Bay Area. After searching for books about other mixed race kids who talk too fast and care too much, I decided to start writing my own. As a woman of Afro-Puerto Rican descent, representing a diverse world isn’t a trend for me. It’s my greatest joy.

My favorite description of my books is that they are “delightfully campy” (Booklist, 2024). Camp is something you don’t always know until you see it. Susan Sontag defined it as ‘sensibility that revels in artifice, stylization, theatricalization, irony, playfulness, and exaggeration rather than content.’ I like to think of it as not what reality is but what it feels like. The world might not be full of easily defined cliques, ingenious schemes, and slayable monsters, but doesn’t it seem like it could be?