Nova Ren Suma is a two-time Edgar Award finalist and the author of the #1 New York Times bestselling The Walls Around Us. She also wrote the YA novels Imaginary Girls and 17 & Gone, as well as the middle-grade novel Dani Noir, which was reissued for the YA shelves under the title Fade Out. Her latest novel, A Room Away from the Wolves, was named a Best Book of 2018 by NPR and called “shiver-inducingly delicious” by The New York Times. She has contributed to the short story anthologies Slasher Girls & Monster Boys, Toil & Trouble, and It’s a Whole Spiel: Love, Latkes, and Other Jewish Stories and published an essay in Here We Are: Feminism for the Real World. She is co-editor-in-chief of FORESHADOW: A Serial YA Anthology, an online publication of YA short fiction of all genres. The print edition, Foreshadow: The Magic of Reading and Writing YA, features 13 stories from the online version as well as craft essays and discussions and will be published in Fall 2020 by Algonquin Young Readers. Nova’s next novel is also forthcoming from Algonquin, tentatively in 2025.
Nova has an MFA in fiction from Columbia University and has been awarded fiction fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the MacDowell Colony, the Millay Colony, and Yaddo. She has taught creative writing at Columbia University, Arizona State University, the Highlights Foundation, with Blue Stoop in Philadelphia, and private workshops elsewhere. She is currently core faculty in the Writing for Children & Young Adults low-residency MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. She is originally from the Hudson Valley and now lives in Philadelphia.
