young adult fiction « Jennifer de Guzman

Jennifer de Guzman is a writer and comics editor living in the San Francisco Bay Area. She writes stories about sad girls, seawater, bottomless wells, airborne plagues, and horses. You can find links to some of them them in the Selected Works section or read them at her Scribd page.

She also writes "Life in Comics," a monthly column for Publishers Weekly Comics Week, and collaborates on "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now," a comics column on Robot 6, with her husband, artist Brian Belew.

Portrait by Brian Belew.

They Say You Were Something in Those Formative Years

"Not quite Sophie Beer" by Dan Foy, www.flickr.com/photos/orangeacid/, used under Creative Commons License

Via the New York Times Paper Cuts blog, I found “Bad Books for Kids,” an essay on young adult fiction by David Mills, first published in Touchstone, a Christian magazine. Mills expresses his shock at what he calls “commercial depravity” in literature for [...]

Auto Draft

At The New Yorker, Laura Miller reviews The Hunger Games, a series of young adult novels set in a society in which teenagers are annually drafted to take part in a gladiator-like contest. But more broadly, Miller explores the genre of dystopian fiction and its appeal to teenagers. She attributes it partially to teenagers’ ability to [...]

All We Ever Wanted

About ten years ago, after a couple of bad jobs and something of an emotional meltdown, I took a little more than a year off to work on my writing. The result was about a score of short stories of varying quality (a couple of them received honorable mention in their respective years of The Year’s [...]

Shining Light on the Demons of Adolescence

For the past few months I have been working on revising my novel Sliver of Light, at the request of an editor, to be more suitable for a young adult audience. She gave me some excellent tips for how to do this, and I did a little supplemental research by taking a look at some of [...]