Thank you to the Morris committee!
Yeah, I know, all right. It was weird for me too. 
Easily *the* YA career highlight! 
I look so… sinister. 
Take Five with ‘Columbia College Today’
I nostalgia’d my old college heydays for Columbia College Today. It was fun.
Norris Kaplan is a MORRIS AWARD Finalist!
Pumped to announce that pubescent grump, Norris Kaplan, has been named one of the finalists of this year’s William C. Morris Award alongside these four AMAZING books:
THE CANDLE AND THE FLAME by Nafiza Azad
GENESIS BEGINS AGAIN by Alicia D. Williams
FRANKLY IN LOVE by David Yoon
THERE WILL COME A DARKNESS by Katy Rose Pool
The William C. Morris YA Debut Award, first given in 2009, honors a book published by a first-time author writing for teens and celebrating impressive new voices in young adult literature. The winner is announced annually at the ALA Youth Media Awards.
The award’s namesake is William C. Morris, an influential innovator in the publishing world and an advocate for marketing books for children and young adults. Bill Morris left an impressive mark on the field of children’s and young adult literature. He was beloved in the publishing field and the library profession for his generosity and marvelous enthusiasm for promoting literature for children and teens.
FIELD GUIDE Paperback Cover Release
The paperback edition of THE FIELD GUIDE TO THE NORTH AMERICAN TEENAGER will feature a brand new cover. Look how purty.
I love the original yellow hardcover but I can’t say I’m not also obsessed with this one.
Art credit goes to Steffi Walthall @just___steffi ( 😭) and designer Chris Kwon @notchriskwon ( 👑). GODDAMN, folks.
Look out for it on January 7th, 2020!
NYC Book Launch Event! (Thursday 1/10)
I’m incredibly pumped for obvious reasons. There is no bigger boss than Ibi (AMERICAN STREET, PRIDE, BLACK ENOUGH: STORIES OF BEING YOUNG & BLACK IN AMERICA) and we both like our sleep, so I promise you it won’t go until the wee hours.
DO I RSVP?
…Not necessary! But if you want to, yes, it can be done right here.
WHERE IS IT?
126 Franklin St, Brooklyn, NY 11222
I hope to see you there!
…And, yes, I’ll try to post more here, as opposed to just tweeting nonsense all day and occasionally mentioning book stuff.
(That’s my new 2019 resolution as someone who has had sugar 5 out of past 6 days, the other resolution has already gloriously flamed out. God, I love sugar.)
I Wrote A Thing That Won A Thing
I’m happy to share that an hour-long pilot I wrote won this year’s Bluecat screenwriting competition… Fun!
The best philosophy for contests I’ve found is to occasionally throw a script into the mayhem and put it out of your mind. Once you make it to the finalists, it’s a lot more ‘lottery of sensibilities’ than ‘career strategy,’ honestly.
Bluecat is a great contest, run by very involved people and their readers give thoughtful feedback, so that alone was worth the entry fee here. The other winners and finalists are also crazy strong writers from what I’ve read.
…And no, they didn’t ask me to write this. My 56 clicks per month according to WordPress couldn’t sell the lint off a Casper mattress.
Anywho, here’s the Pitch Deck of the project since people have emailed me to ask the premise. (What? I like putting together PowerPoints. Don’t shame me for it… It’s better than being really into Crossfit or something.)
FIELD GUIDE Cover Released
AWESOMENESS ALERT!
Until now, this could only exist as a color printout, thumbtacked over my desk but my first novel officially has a cover, folks! This is the real deal, coming out at Balzer + Bray / Harpercollins on January 22, 2019.
The more I look at this image, the more in love I fall with the design. It captures all those high school notebooks that would start out clean in September — color-coded with perfect handwriting — only to end up scribbled into oblivion by the end of the school year. All my thanks to the designer Michelle Cunningham and the amazeballs artist Christina Allen.
Beloved – One Shot Comic
Back in college, I really — really — wanted to write comic books for a living. Most of them were awful. I promise I’m not doing that self-deprecating thing writers do; they were just… ghastly. (Prisons on asteroids. Nuff said.) With that said, it led to this pretty cool one-shot collab with my fellow Marvel Comics intern at the time, Victor Ochoa, and David Habben, an amazing artist based in Salt Lake City, Utah. I figured I would put it here.
(Click thumbnail to read.)