10 Authors Discuss Michael Jackson, Crooked Teeth, and More in November’s YA Open Mic

YA Open Mic is a monthly series in which YA authors share personal stories on topics of their choice. The aim of the series is to peel away the formality of bios and offer authors a platform to talk about something readers won’t necessarily find on their websites.
This month, 10 authors discuss everything from Michael Jackson to crooked teeth. All have YA books that either release this month or released in recent months. Check out previous YA Open Mic posts here.

Lily Anderson, author of Not Now, Not Ever

My first book is about a white girl.
Maybe you read it when it came out last year. Maybe you saw my photo on the back jacket flap, the fake yellow-blond hair and pale green eyes. Maybe you thought that white girl I wrote about was me.
Lots of women of color start off writing about white folks. Shonda Rhimes has Meredith Grey. Rachel Renee Russel has Nikki Maxwell. Pam Munoz Ryan has Charley Parkhurst. I have Trixie Watson.
Whiteness is the culture  of the majority, the stick we’re measured against. It’s what made my mother and grandmother burn the curls out of their hair with lye and red hot combs warmed on the stove. It’s part of me—thanks, Dad!—but I exist slightly outside of it—thanks, Mom! As an Afrolatina, it’s difficult to decode my own experience. How much is my Puerto Rican heritage or my blackness or the balance of being raised by a single white father?
I wrote about a white girl because it was easier. Because no one tells you that you write white people wrong. Because I didn’t have to tear off figurative bandages and give away the hard parts of myself. I didn’t have to start every conversation with the percentages in my genetics.
But then there were braver people than me writing great #ownvoices. People who were willing to bare themselves, willing to balance entertainment and politics. I wish I had led the way—like Anna-Marie McLemore and Sandhya Menon and Angie Thomas and and and—but I had to wait until book two.
Not Now, Not Ever is the black girl romantic comedy I always looked for on the shelves and never found. Trixie, my white girl, is in there, too. She’s still part of me, too. I won’t be ashamed of being everything.
Slowly but surely, I will stretch every ounce of myself onto paper and give it to you. I will give you my honesty. And boner jokes. Hopefully in equal measure.

Emily Suvada, author of This Moral Coil

I grew up poor. It’s something I’m neither ashamed nor proud of—merely a facet of my identity, like my accent or height. I went to college on a scholarship, then threw myself into the job I thought would pay the most, eager to break the cycle of poverty. Today, I’m lucky enough to be following my dreams with the financial security I didn’t have as a child. There are parts of me that will never change, though—I hate spending money, loathe waste, and I see people in desperate situations and know with certainty that I could be in their place. These traits are reminders of where I came from, but they’re not as stark as the physical reminder of my teeth.

I grew up in Australia, which has universal healthcare, but it doesn’t cover orthodontics. My crooked teeth, inherited from my mother, and my grandmother before her, were a problem we couldn’t possibly afford to solve. I learned to smile, awkwardly and uncomfortably, with my lips closed.

When I started working, I considered adult braces but couldn’t justify the cost. By then, I wasn’t so sure I needed ‘fixing,’ anyway. My teeth were part of my DNA, and a reminder of my past and how hard I’d worked to get where I was. Something inside me fell into place when I read a line in William Gibson’s Neuromancer about a bartender with bad teeth: “In an age of affordable beauty, there was something heraldic about his lack of it.”

Reading that line, I understood myself for the first time—that my blood, my past, and my flaws make me who I am. I’m not ashamed of how I look, or of the forces that have shaped me. I don’t want to be beautiful; I want to be heraldic. So I’m not fixing my damn teeth.

Fred Aceves, author of The Closest I’ve Come

At eight years old I wanted to breakdance better than my friend J.P. He did the Worm to Michael Jackson’s music, inching across the floor with the graceful elasticity of that invertebrate creature.
I could only do the easier Reverse Worm.
It begins with a sort of handstand, and you slowly bend your arms, easing your chest onto the floor, then the rest of your body.
One day I saw a bold variation: a 180 air spin before the guy’s hands touched the floor.
I thought: if I pull that off, I’ll be better than J.P.
I found the courage to attempt it when I discovered the glove at a neighbor’s house. The single, white, rhinestone-encrusted Michael Jackson glove.
I thought that toy store glove would give me dancing superpowers.
As my mom took a shower, I slipped on the glove and popped in Thriller, a cassette I played so often it eventually stuck and spilled shiny, coffee-colored tape.
After some footwork I felt ready. I did a spin-jump, and double palmed the floor—a decent landing. But my skinny arms gave out and my chest slammed down. I lay in pain and unable to breathe.
I thought of my mom, who would come out to find her son’s lifeless body. What would she think when her eyes fixated on the sparkly glove? I couldn’t let her see it.
With my last bit of energy, I tore it off and flung it across the room. The glove hit the wall and slid behind the couch.
Eventual I regained my breath, returned the glove and retired from breakdancing after only a few months. But I learned I two lessons:

1. Gloves aren’t magic.
2. The only person to beat is yourself.

Success comes in small increments. You have to delight in each improvement and keep going. With that determination, I later balled better than most guys in my neighborhood.
And much later, that’s how I became an author.

Lydia Kang, author of The November Girl

I recall, sometime around age five, looking around myself and wondering: “Why did I have to be born different?”
I grew up in Maryland. For all of elementary school, my classmates were white. I was angry about being Korean. I was angry that I was born under this designation of “other.” I was angry that classmates called my nose flat, that they stretched out their eyes to mimic my eyes, and they couldn’t put me into the limited labels they had at the ready. “Are you Chinese? Japanese? Christian? Jewish?” And because those were the only the labels they could consider, when I told them I was Korean, they’d puzzle their eyebrows together, fairly sure that was an unacceptable answer.
In fifth and sixth grade, the bullying became a tidal wave of harassment. I was made fun of because my clothes were hand-me-downs; no matter that my blond haired, blue-eyed classmates had shabbier clothes than I did. For months on end, my best friends wouldn’t play or speak to me. Other classmates looked on with benign interest, but for the most part, did nothing but watch the abuse.
I switched schools in ninth grade, and entered classrooms surrounded by girls who were Korean, Indian, Greek, Black, Thai. The harassment stopped, and for the first time, my grades flourished. No one considered my race as a reason to be a friend, or not. And then a very strange thing happened in 11th grade—I started to feel pretty.
I am a 46-year-old woman now. I am a doctor, and an author, and have raised three gloriously complex and beautiful children. But even now, I still remember those hateful kids’ faces, their words, their actions. I have since forgiven them—they were children, after all. But their marks on my life haven’t faded. I still see them, embedded within me. I see it in my writing, fighting my instinct to whitewash my own books, giving myself permission to write characters that actually resemble me. It’s been incredibly difficult. But I’m also realizing that how and what I write can’t be forced by anyone outside of myself. I’ll go at my own pace because it’s exhausting, trying to please everyone.
I’ve come a long way, but there is still further yet for me to go. I am still battling a vicious fight within myself to reconcile the person who is terrified of not being accepted, and the person who knows this truth: I am doing mighty fine, on my own terms.

Jasmine Warga, author of Here We Are Now

It is late March and I am 37 weeks pregnant with my second child. My face is swollen like a marshmallow and my back aches. To make things more uncomfortable, my contractions have already started, but I am not in labor. I am in what is called prodromal labor, which is basically as unpleasant as it sounds. I am in labor, but not active labor. No one quite knows what causes prodromal labor, but there is a theory that it sometimes happens to women who have not yet mentally let go in the way that is required to actually physically give birth.
Learning how to let go is one of the major themes of Here We Are Now. Letting go is something I am not very good at it.
It is late March and I am 37 weeks pregnant and my phone is ringing. I answer the phone. It is my dad. At first his voice is muffled and I cannot understand him. It sounds like he is laughing. It is not until he says, “Sweetie, I have bad news,” that I realize he is crying, not laughing. I hold my breath, waiting for the next sentence to slam down on me like a guillotine. “Uncle Abdalla has died.”
A few hours later, I am sitting in the back of a car that is taking my father to the airport to fly to Jordan to bury his brother. Teary-eyed, my father looks at me and says, “I am so sorry. I am going to miss her birth, too.” He missed the birth of my first child by 24 hours. He was on a transatlantic flight home from the Middle East.
Learning how to let your heart live on two sides of the Atlantic is one of the themes of Here We Are Now. Sometimes it can feel like walking a tightrope with heavy buckets of water on your head—a nearly impossible balancing act.
Nine days after my uncle has died, I crawl into bed and take a deep breath and I let go of everything I have been holding inside of me. My daughter is born 12 hours later.
Her name is Juniper. My father texts me her name in Arabic script, reminding me it is a desert tree that grows in abundance on the Arabian Peninsula.
Here We Are Now explores how endings are always also beginnings. Juniper has my uncle’s large, dark eyes. They share a zodiac sign. When she grows up, she will know his name.

Traci Chee, author of The Speaker

I attended my first funeral when I was eight. It was my grandmother’s, and I remember two things: her wax-like hands and the feeling that the world had changed, now that she wasn’t in it.
Then came my great uncles, aunts, grandfathers. I got used to wearing black. To flowers, incense, and the businesslike efficiency of cataloguing condolence gifts as my family held funeral after funeral after funeral.
I knew, even then. I knew it with such clarity I wrote it into The Speaker more than 20 years later: Once the people you love start dying, they don’t stop.
In high school, a classmate was diagnosed with cancer. One day as I complained about the injustice of something-or-another, he gestured to his own body and demanded, “You think this is fair?”
He died a few years later.
One of my friends was 27 when he attended his first funeral. It was his grandmother’s, and I thought how unfair it was that he’d gone so long without having to do this—the grieving, the praying, the wondering.
But he was one of us now. Once the people you love start dying….
My great aunts and uncles, now in their ’90s, attend funerals every other weekend.
Sometimes I think our lives are just cycles of love and loss. People enter our orbits like blazing stars, and then are whisked away into darkness, leaving us in a world a little emptier, a little less bright. And we pick ourselves up and go on, somehow.
I keep writing about it. About death. I can’t seem to stop, can’t seem to find the answers, can’t seem to understand why. I’ve been writing about it since I was 10 and, as more and more people are taken, I think I’ll never stop. I can’t stop. This how I remember them, honor them, prove that even if they’re gone, the world is changed because they were in it.
They won’t stop dying, so I won’t stop writing.
I miss you all.

Heather Cumiskey, author of I Like You Like This

I grew up the youngest in a house of older brothers. My parents had me late in life. My family didn’t do affection or say “I love you.” And I craved it.
Mom and Dad were super strict, especially with me being the token girl. They’d lost their first daughter to leukemia, their first son was tragically killed by a car, so I was never allowed to do anything. I never made it to the cool keg parties or saw live bands like other kids. My mother wasn’t young and fun like some moms, and my dad didn’t throw a ball around with us in the yard.
Yet my diaries are filled with lots of crushes and boyfriends, making out, drinking beer, and smoking pot.
I rebelled because I believed my parents didn’t really love me. They yelled, slammed doors, and never came to check on me after hours of crying in my room.
Worse yet, no one ever said, “I’m sorry.” And no one spoke of the two children who had died.
Some days it felt like living inside a black hole would have been more comforting than being in my house.
It was only once I went away to college that I found my parents’ love. I met kids of divorce, one who had a father in jail, and another whose mother preferred popping pills over her own daughter. Slowly, I began to remember all of the good I had received. Like how my mother volunteered as my Girl Scout leader and handmade all of my baton twirling competition outfits. And how my dad taught me the piano and never turned down overtime so he could put us through school. And more. Much more.
I had to gain some distance from that house to reflect, to remember. To see how much they truly loved me.

Ava Jae, author of Into the Black

“Excuse me, no offense, but you look like a boy.”
I was working as a cashier at my local bookstore, in mid-transaction, and a seven-or-so-year-old girl interrupted her grandparents to say that.
It didn’t bother me—if anything I kind of, quietly, liked it. I answered with a shrug and a small smile, “Oh, okay.”
Her grandparents, however, were horrified.
“Oh! No, don’t say that, no she doesn’t, she has a very cute pixie cut, see?” her grandmother said.
“It’s fine, really,” I answered, trying to ignore my warming face. “It doesn’t bother me at all.”
But the grandparents weren’t hearing it.
“You don’t say that,” the grandfather admonished the kid, as if her observation that I don’t dress femme and yes, look pretty androgynous—even boyish—was somehow shameful. And while the girl’s “no offense” probably indicated she thought, at least, that saying I looked like a boy was bad, this conversation could’ve gone so differently. If it’d ended with a shrug and a smile and “Oh, okay,” maybe she would’ve walked away thinking, “Oh, it’s okay that person looked like a boy to me.” Maybe she would’ve learned there’s nothing remarkable about someone she perceived as not-a-boy looking indeed like a boy to her.
Instead, the onus was on me to console these grandparents who vehemently denied that I looked like a boy. Instead, I had to pretend it was fine they were reaffirming that kid’s believe that I was supposed to look femme.
I left work frustrated at the missed opportunity. That little girl likely walked away thinking, “Yeah, it was definitely bad that cashier looked like a boy to me.”
And that sucks.

Sarah Raughley, author of Siege of Shadows

Oftentimes, when I talk to people at book signings or after panels, it amazes me when I hear someone say, “You’re living my dream!” It amazes me, of course, because I was once on the other side, looking at authors signing books and wishing I could be them. But perhaps what amazes me more is their amazement—and the fact that, at times, even as a published author, I don’t share that amazement myself.
It’s my family, friends and colleagues that continuously have to remind me that what I’ve accomplished is pretty awesome: publishing books while completing a dissertation. That’s not easy. Yet, it still feels so unnatural to congratulate myself, and difficult to see myself through the impressed eyes of another. You’d think that this would have changed after becoming a published author, but in many ways it’s still a challenge to lift myself out of the old thinking patterns I developed in youth.
As a writer, there’s always new reasons to feel insecure about something. Like maybe you’re not as known as other writers who started out at the same time as you. Maybe you feel like your writing isn’t strong enough. A negative review can be crushing regardless of how many positive ones you receive. And if a friend promises to read and review your work and never gets back to you—you start to think of that old phrase, “better say nothing if you’ve got nothing nice to say.” Each new step in life brings new challenges, fears and insecurities, but what can you do except plow on? Sometimes it’s a struggle, but I always tell myself that no matter what, I have to continue to believe in myself. I hope you will too.

Anna Priemaza, author of Kat and Meg Conquer the World

In 12th grade, I dropped out of accounting class because I could see my friends out the window in the courtyard. They had third period lunch, and I had third period accounting, and this simply wouldn’t do. So I dropped accounting, asked my BFF what class she had fourth period, and signed up for that instead.
To be clear: it’s not that school wasn’t important to me. I had the top marks in my grade, and I worked my butt off to achieve them. School was important to me; friendship was more important.
I’ve never understood why there aren’t more YA books with friendship as their primary focus. If I had my way, shelves would be overflowing with them, because my life has been full of friendships that have filled my heart and broken my heart and taken my heart from my body and blown it up two sizes and held it safe and vulnerable in a glass case full of cotton. I could write a book about my high school romance; I could write a dozen books about my high school friendships.
I don’t write books about friendship because I’m trying to fill a gap on shelves, though. I write books about friendship because at 16, my BFF and I made shirts declaring each other as best friends and wore them to school. Because at 24, when my law school bestie moved away, she and I clung to each other and cried and cried and cried. Because even now, in my ’30s, I’ve never stopped being that girl for whom friendship makes the world go round.