Emery Lord

Emery Lord is a bestselling young adult fiction author from the American Midwest best known for writing stories about weird families, best friends, high school, and crushes. She has the uncanny ability to make her readers feel more awkward than they thought possible yet combustibly alive. Lord always knew she wanted to be an author and made plans for it even as she took the communications writing route that she believed would be more viable. However, it was not until she was twenty-three that she realized that if she wanted to write fiction she had to be writing fiction. She wrote a lot while she was a teen and while in college though for the most part she did personal essays. During this time, Lord would take the experiences in her life and craft brief nonfiction like that found in magazines. It was her way of finding meaning and catharsis and framing her problems and finding closure. She was also a voracious reader growing up and as an English Lit major found that there was a dearth of the novels that had the unflinching earnestness and emotional honesty she craved. Her journey toward publishing young fiction came about when she was thirteen and read a Sarah Dessen novel that she found at the library. Once she graduated and started writing, she always knew she wanted to write YA.