Malinda Lo

Malinda Lo is an American writer of young adult novels including Ash, Huntress, Adaptation, and Inheritance. She also does research on diversity in young adult literature publishing.

Life and writing career

Lo was born in China and moved to the United States at the age of three. She graduated from Wellesley College and earned a master's degree in Regional Studies from Harvard. She enrolled at Stanford with the intention of obtaining a PhD in Cultural and Social Anthropology, but left with a second master's degree.^[1] Lo began writing for the culture blog After Ellen in 2003, and at one point served as the managing editor.^[2] Her first novel, Ash, was published by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers in 2009.^[3] Ash was a finalist for the William C. Morris Award, the Andre Norton Award for YA Fantasy and Science Fiction, the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award, and the Lambda Literary Award.^[4] Her second book, Huntress, was published by Little, Brown in 2011. It is set in the same fantasy world as Ash, which mixes Asian and European influences.^[5] Her third book, Adaptation, was published in 2012. Reviewers at Booklist, Kirkus and elsewhere have compared it favorably to the television program The X-Files.^[6] The X-Files was also the subject of Lo's graduate research at Stanford.^[1] A sequel to Adaptation, titled Inheritance, was published in 2013.^[7] Malinda Lo was made a member of the faculty of the Lambda Literary Foundation's 2013 Writer Retreat for Emerging LGBT Voices, along with Samuel R. Delany, Sarah Schulman and David Groff.^[4]

Research on diversity

In 2011, Malinda Lo co-founded Diversity in YA, a website and book tour to promote and celebrate diverse representations in young adult literature, with fellow young adult author Cindy Pon.^[8] Diversity in YA highlights books with characters of color, LGBTQ characters, and disabled characters and collects data on the number of books with diverse characters and authors that are published annually. Starting in 2012, Lo has periodically published analysis of the diversity in Publishers Weekly and New York Times bestselling young adult novels. Her 2013 analysis showed that 15 percent of New York Times bestselling young adult novels featured main characters of color, 12 percent featured LGBT main characters, and three percent had main characters with disabilities.^[9]

Bibliography

Novels

• Ash (2009)
• Huntress (2011)
• Adaptation (2012)
• Inheritance (2013)

Short stories

• "The Fox" (2011) in Subterranean Online
• "One True Love" (2012) in Foretold
• "Good Girl" (2012) in Diverse Energies
• "Ghost Town" (2013) in Defy The Dark
• "The Twelfth Girl" (2014) in Grim

References