Season 2 | Episode 10 • Wendelin Van Draanen

Host & Guest
Guest
Wendelin Van Draanen
Host
Kathleen Kaiser
Producer
Adanna Moriarty
About This Episode
For each writer on the publishing path, the journey is different. Today our guest is best-selling and award-winning author Wendelin Van Draanen. She writes YA fiction across genres in hopes that youth can find courage, relatability, and light in her stories.
Kathleen and Wendelin discuss how she became an author. Never having written a thing—from math teacher to signed author—she currently has published over 30 books. Her story is an integral part of the author’s journey after 10 years of rejection. An editor finally saw what Wendelin knew was true already. Through perseverance and dedication to her main character, something any writer would benefit from when trying to sell their stories.
Fresh off a book tour for her newest novel, The Peach Rebellion. Set in 1940s central California, Wendelin made time to sit with our host for another can’t miss episode of Talking Book Publishing.
About the Author

Wendelin Van Draanen
Wendelin Van Draanen has written more than thirty novels for young readers and teens. She is the author of the 18-book Edgar-winning Sammy Keyes series—often called “The new Nancy Drew”—and wrote Flipped, which was named a Top 100 Children’s Novel for the 21st Century by School Library Journal and became a Warner Brothers feature film, with Rob Reiner directing.
Van Draanen’s latest novel, The Peach Rebellion, explores the lives and loves of three young women who come from completely different backgrounds and join forces to take a stand against the patriarchy.
Her other stand-alone titles include Wild Bird, The Secret Life of Lincoln Jones, Runaway, Confessions of a Serial Kisser, Swear to Howdy, and The Running Dream, which was awarded American Library Association’s Schneider Family Award for its “expression of the disability experience.”
Van Draanen has also created two four-book series for younger readers. The Shredderman books feature a boy who deals with a bully and received the Christopher Award for “affirming the highest values of the human spirit,” and was made into a Nickelodeon movie. The related Gecko & Sticky books, which are full of alluring alliterations that make for rousing read-alouds, are perfect for reluctant readers.
A classroom teacher for fifteen years, Van Draanen resides in California where she can be spotted riding shopping carts across parking lots. She and her husband, Mark Parsons, have two sons and enjoy the three R’s: Reading, Running, and Rock’n’Roll.
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