Lizzie Skurnick

Lizzie Skurnick is a young adult and teen fiction author best known for her novels and essays on teen fiction. Her best-known work is “Shelf Discovery” a creative work praising the young adult novels of the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Her works on culture and literature has been featured in the “LA Times,” the “New York Times Book Review,” “Politics Daily,” “Time,” the “Daily Beast,” “Bookforum,” “O,” “NPR,” “The Awl,” and “Jezebel” among many other publications and outlets. Skurnick has at one time served in the Board of The National Book Critics Circle, earned fellowships and residencies from the AWP, Yaddo, Ucross, and the VCCA. She is also a frequent speaker on the intersection between online and print literature on AWP, SXSW, and BEA and has also spoken on young adult literature. She currently edits one of the first literary blogs on the internet titled “Old Hag” that has won Best of the Web Pick Award by “Forbes.” Her best work is the collection of essays that she had fun reading as a youth in the novel “Shelf Discovery.” Working for the “New York Times” she wrote a compendium of words in the novel titled “That Should Be a Word,” which was the title of a column she wrote for the paper. She has also written several novels in the “Love Stories,” “Sweet Valley University” series, and prequels to the “Alias” TV series. She has been a professor of creative writing at Johns Hopkins University and New York University. She currently lives in Baltimore, Maryland.