Robin Talley

Robin Talley is an American queer author of young adult fiction. Her first book was Lies We Tell Ourselves (2014). It won the inaugural Amnesty CILIP Honour and was shortlisted for two prestigious awards: the CILIP Carnegie Medal and the Lambda Literary Award.

Robin Talley was born in Roanoke, Virginia. She attended William Fleming High School, and Patrick Henry High School and earned a BA in literature and communications from American University, Washington, D.C..

Talley did digital communications work for LGBTQ rights, women’s rights, educational equity, and other progressive causes for fifteen years before becoming a full-time writer.

"I grew up loving reading and writing. Up until about age 12, my dream was to be a novelist. It wasn’t until I was in my early twenties and working in communications for a civil rights nonprofit organization that I decided to try writing again," Robin Talley said to Guardian.

She is now the New York Times-bestselling author of seven novels for teen readers, including As I Descended (2016), Pulp (2018), The Love Curse of Melody McIntyre (2020), and Music From Another World (2020).

Her short stories have appeared in the young adult collections Toil & Trouble: 15 Tales of Women & Witchcraft, All Out: The No-Longer-Secret Stories of Queer Teens throughout the Ages, A Tyranny of Petticoats: 15 Stories of Belles, Bank Robbers and Other Badass Girls, and Feral Youth.

Robin Talley lives in Washington, DC, but regularly visits Boston and New York.

Photo credit: robintalley.com