Malinda Lo is an American writer of young adult novels including Ash, Huntress, Adaptation, Inheritance,A Line in the Dark, and Last Night at the Telegraph Club. She also does research on diversity in young adult literature and publishing.
Personal life
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]
A stand-alone thriller novel, A Line in the Dark, was published in 2017 and was named a Best Book of the Year by Kirkus, Vulture, and Chicago Public Library.[16]
In 2021, Lo released the book Last Night at the Telegraph Club, following a teenaged American-born Chinese woman coming to terms with her homosexuality during the McCarthy Red Scare in 1950s San Francisco, adapted from a short story she wrote for the 2018 anthology All Out: The No-Longer-Secret Stories Of Queer Teens Throughout The Ages.[17] She has since written Notes from the Telegraph Club, a series of blogposts about her research for the novel, and described that she chose to use Chinese characters with footnote translations for when the characters are speaking Chinese to each other, partly because the romanization of Chinese was not yet standardized in the 1950s and "Romanized Chinese of the 1950s was for the benefit of non-Chinese Westerners, mostly white people" and partly to make clear the sense of insider versus outsider culture.[17]Last Night at the Telegraph Club was well received, with Kirkus opening their review with "Finally, the intersectional, lesbian, historical teen novel so many readers have been waiting for"[18] and Joanne Zou writing for Farrago that it "struck a very personal chord with me. It is a book full of hope and love and community and gay people, some of my favourite elements in storytelling. I am glad this book exists and it made me glad that I exist."[19] In May 2021, it was announced that Last Night at the Telegraph Club had earned Lo another ALA Best Fiction for Young Adults nomination.[20] In November 2021, the novel was awarded the National Book Award for Young People's Literature.[21]Last Night at the Telegraph Club won the 2022 Stonewall Book Award for Young Adult Literature.[22]
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.[25] 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.[26]
The Fox (2011), short story set after Huntress, published in Subterranean Magazine, summer 2011 (Subterranean Press # 19)
Ash is also found in Love Bites 2: Arizona / Ash / Blood Ties / The Secret Circle: The Initiation and the Captive (2010)
Adaptation series
Adaptation (2012)
Inheritance (2013)
Natural Selection (2013) Short story, online
Riverside series
Malinda Lo contributed to Tremontaine, the prequel to Ellen Kushner's Riverside series. The prequel was written by Ellen Kushner, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Malinda Lo, Joel Derfner, Racheline Maltese, Patty Bryant, and Paul Witcover with cover art by Kathleen Jennings, and was published as a digital serial by Serial Box in 2015–2016.[28]
Stand-alone short stories
"One True Love" (2012) in Foretold: 14 Tales of Prophecy and Prediction, edited by Carrie Ryan, republished in Heiresses of Russ 2013: The Year's Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction (2013), edited by Tenea D. Johnson and Steve Berman
"Good Girl" (2012) in Diverse Energies, edited by Tobias S. Buckle and Joe Monti, republished in Futuredaze 2: Reprise (2014), edited by Erin Underwood and Nancy Holder
"Ghost Town" (2013) in Defy The Dark, edited by Saundra Mitchell
"The Twelfth Girl" (2014) in Grim, edited by Christine Johnson
"The Cure" (2015) in Interfictions: A Journal of Interstitial Arts, Issue 6, November 2015, found online[29]
"New Year" (2018) in All Out: The No-Longer-Secret Stories of Queer Teens throughout the Ages, an anthology edited by Saundra Mitchell, February 2018,[30] subsequently adapted to her novel Last Night at the Telegraph Club (2021)[17]
"Meet Cute" (2018) in Fresh Ink, an anthology edited by Lamar Giles, August 2018[31]
"We Could Be Heroes" (2018) in Autostraddle, October 1, 2019, found online[32]
"Red" (2019) in Foreshadow, Issue 1, January 2019, found online[33]
"Don't Speak" (2019) in The New York Times, "Viewfinders: 10 Y.A. Novelists Spin Fiction From Vintage Photos," June 28, 2019[34]
Nonfiction
A letter to her sixteen-year-old self, in The Letter Q: Queer Writers' Notes to their Younger Selves (2012), edited by Sarah Moon and James License
"Forever Feminist," essay in the anthology Here We Are: Feminism for the Real World (2017), edited by Kelly Jensen[35][36]
