Eliot Schrefer

After a childhood spent in Illinois, Connecticut, California, Maryland, and Florida, Eliot Schrefer attended Harvard University, where he graduated with High Honors in French and American literature. After a year teaching at a boarding school in Rome, he settled down in New York City. Schrefer’s first novel, Glamorous Disasters, was a somewhat autobiographical tale of a young man living in Harlem and paying off college debt while tutoring Fifth-Avenue families. After writing another novel for adults, he turned to young adult fiction with The School for Dangerous Girls, about a boarding school for criminal young ladies. That book was selected as a “Best of the Teen Age” by the New York Public Library, and his next novel, The Deadly Sister, earned a starred review from School Library Journal. Endangered, his fifth novel, was a finalist for the National Book Award in Young People’s Literature, one of NPR’s “Best of 2012,” and an editor’s choice in The New York Times, which called it “dazzling, big-hearted.” The book was also a finalist for the Walden Award and won the Green Earth Book Award and the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award. Schrefer journeyed to the Democratic Republic of Congo while researching the novel, and has since traveled wider as he’s embarked on a quartet of novels about the great apes, one book for each primate, detailing a young person’s relationship with that animal. His follow-up, Threatened, was also a National Book Award Finalist, among other honors. Since then, he has written The Lost Rainforest series and the Animal Rescue Agency series for younger readers, as well as the Stonewall Honor recipient young adult novel, The Darkness Outside Us, and the Printz Honor recipient Queer Ducks (and Other Animals) His works have been translated into many languages including German, Russian, Polish, Taiwanese, Bulgarian, and Japanese. Most recently, Schrefer joined the faculty of Fairleigh Dickinson's low residency MFA program, as well as the MFA in writing for children at Hamline University. You can find him on Twitter @EliotSchrefer, and online here at www.EliotSchrefer.com.