Kelly Jensen is a former teen librarian who worked in several public libraries before pursuing a full-time career in writing and editing. Her current position is with Book Riot, the largest independent book website in North America, where she focuses on talking about young adult literature in all of its manifestations. Before becoming a fully-fledged adult-like person, she worked in the swanky Texas Legislative Library entering data into a computer while surrounded by important politicians, scooped gelato for hungry college students, and spent hours reading, annotating, and scanning small-town Texas newspapers into a giant searchable database.

Her books include Here We Are: Feminism For The Real World (Algonquin Young Readers, February 2017) a collection of art, essays, and words from over 44 voices. (Don’t) Call Me Crazy is a collection of art, essays, and words to launch a powerful and important conversation about mental health. It was named a best book of 2018 by the Washington Post and earned a Schneider Family Book Award Honor for distinguished representation of the disability experience. Both books are published by Algonquin Young Readers, which will publish her third anthology Body Talk, a collection about the physical and political nature of the human body, in Fall 2020. She cohosts the popular YA book podcast Hey YA with Eric Smith and is a regular cohost on Book Riot’s All The Books podcast with Liberty Hardy. Kelly also writes the twice-weekly “What’s Up in YA?” newsletter for Book Riot, which reaches nearly 60,000 inboxes. 

Kelly lives in Illinois with her husband, her bunny, and five needy-but-awesome cats. In her free time, she is a certified yoga teacher, writes for her personal blog STACKED (stackedbooks.org), volunteers for Young At Heart, drinks a lot of tea, and practices photography. Some of her favorite things include churro smashmallows, black licorice, adoring eyelashes on various animals (giraffes are the best, obv), fusing glass, spending too many hours in bookstores, debating the best seltzer in the world’s best secret seltzer Facebook group, and owning as much Halloween decor as possible.

Her writing has been featured on Bustle, in Bust Magazine, at The Writer’s Digest, The Huffington Post, at Rookie Magazine, The Horn Book, BlogHer, School Library Journal. She contributed an essay and a guide to teen sexuality in pop culture for Amber J. Keyser’s The V-Word: True Stories of First-Time Sex and is the author of the book It Happens: A Guide to Contemporary Realistic Fiction for the YA Reader from VOYA Press.

Kelly is happy to discuss possibilities for professional speaking, editing, and/or writing opportunities, in person or online. You can learn more about her, her background, and her passions in this interview.

She is represented by Tina Dubois at ICM Partners and can be reached at [email protected].