It can change minds, hearts, and even the world. The written word closes the distance between continents, between the dead and the living and the not-yet-born, between the real and the imagined. How did you go about creating this world where reading is forbidden and literally magical? As a lifelong lover of books, I’ve always felt like reading and writing were magical. The world-building in The Reader is just so intricate and complex.

Everything since then has been this exhilarating ride, writing harder and faster than I’ve ever written in my life, and working with the amazing people at Penguin to put the best possible version of this book in readers’ hands. After two months of working with my mentor, the fabulously talented Renée Ahdieh, bestselling author of The Wrath and the Dawn and The Rose and the Dagger, I landed with agent/warrior Barbara Poelle, who got The Reader and me to Putnam shortly after. Then came Pitch Wars, an incredible online contest run by author Brenda Drake that matches up unagented writers with mentors who help them get their manuscripts ready for a great group of literary agents. The intense focus on craft really helped shape my writing style and sensibilities, and it nurtured my desire to always keep learning and improving. I loved it-the rigor, the workshops, the heady theoretical discussions.

You don't want to miss it! Can you tell us a little bit about your path to publishing? I feel like there have been three stages to my writing journey so far: academics, Pitch Wars, and hang-on-to-your-hats! I’ve known I wanted to be a writer since high school, so I threw myself headfirst into it (as I am wont to do) when I went to college, taking gobs and gobs of literature and creative writing courses as an undergrad at UC Santa Cruz, and later as a graduate student at San Francisco State. She will be speaking on the Genre-Bending SFF panel at SLJTeen Live! on August 10. In our starred review, we called debut YA author Traci Chee’s The Reader (Putnam September 13, 2016) “A fresh, diverse fantasy highly recommended for fans of Cornelia Funke’s Inkheart and female-powered adventures.” SLJ caught up with Chee and talked about her path to publishing, the need for diversity in genre teen fiction, and her writing process.

The reader chee