All of that was bound up in this exploration of love in this space.” “M usic festivals struggle with diversity, and they also have to reckon with this uniquely American threat of violence. And so it became a way for me to reach back to these communities, these environments that have given me so much” while representing a microcosm of America, Johnson says. “It was written, drafted, revised, copy edited…in the context of a world I had not anticipated living in when we sold the book.
“ Rise to the Sun is a book about communal joy and about finding lightness through grief,” says Johnson, a lover of live music, who wrote the entirety of the book during a year in which all the major festivals-Bonnaroo, Coachella, SXSW-were cancelled. Her sophomore novel, Rise to the Sun (Scholastic, July 6), is the vibrant story of Olivia Brooks and Toni Foster, two teenage girls with very different approaches to life and love who meet at a summer music festival in northern Georgia.
Take our word for it: Johnson is a superstar with staying power. “I mean, it’s in Publishers Weekly, so I’m gonna take their word for it. “It feels very fresh-I’m not convinced it’s real,” says Johnson, 26, who spoke with me by phone the next day from her family’s home in Indiana, where she returned to ride out the pandemic.
The announcement was made the same day her seven-figure two-book deal with Disney/Hyperion, for a middle-grade series based on a “superhero origin story in the tone of the Baby-Sitters Club,” was named Deal of the Week by Publishers Weekly. Seven months later, the novel earned Johnson her first Lambda Literary Award nomination for excellence in LGBTQ+ YA fiction. Her debut novel, You Should See Me in a Crown, featuring ingenious would-be prom queen Liz Lighty, turned out to be the kind of book that draws a crowd: “The queer prom romance you didn’t know you needed,” as Kirkus called it in a starred review, became the inaugural YA pick for Reese’s Book Club in August 2020.
In the surreal swirl of a pandemic year, Leah Johnson became a bestselling author.
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