cherylklein

Some Fun Facts

  • I grew up in a small town named Peculiar, Missouri, a few miles south of Kansas City. The town motto is “Where the odds are with you!”

  • My Internet username “Chavelaque” derives from my nickname in high-school Spanish class, "Chavela" (pronounced shah-VAY-luh, and which became an affectionate nickname for me with a couple friends), combined with the Spanish word for "what" -- que, which is pronounced "kay." It’s thus a bilingual pun on “Cheryl K,” and it also appears in Lisa Yee’s So Totally Emily Ebers as the name of a fancy restaurant.

  • I appeared on “Jeopardy!” in July 2000. I took third place, but I won tickets to The Lion King.

  • While I remain an admirer of the Harry Potter books as books, and I’m proud of the work that my Scholastic colleagues and I put into them, I utterly deplore J. K. Rowling’s views on trans people, and I encourage you not to give her any more money.

  • My favorite books (that I didn't work on) include Charlie Parker Played Be-Bop by Chris Raschka; The Gardener by Sarah Stewart and David Small; A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett (problematic, I know); The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley; Possession by A. S. Byatt; Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke; and the complete works of Hilary McKay, Jane Austen, Jennifer Crusie, Dorothy Sayers, and Patrick O’Brian. As much as I read for my job, I still passionately love reading for pleasure, too, and will happily burble on about my current book should you ask.

  • Outside of reading, I love theater (especially musicals, especially Stephen Sondheim) and film; cooking, baking (particularly sourdough), running, and yoga — none of which I do particularly well, but all with great pleasure; and spending time with my friends and family, especially my husband and son.

A few interviews with me

 

 

The Flap Copy

Cheryl Klein is the editorial director at Algonquin Young Readers, an imprint of Workman Publishing / Hachette Book Group. She is also the author of two adult books, The Magic Words: Writing Great Books for Children and Young Adults and Second Sight: An Editor's Talks on Writing, Revising, and Publishing Books for Children and Young Adults, and four picture books, Wings, Thunder Trucks, A Year of Everyday Wonders, and Hamsters Make Terrible Roommates. Prior to her work at AYR, she spent five years working as the editorial director of Lee & Low Books, and sixteen years as an editor at Arthur A. Levine Books/Scholastic. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, and can be found online here and as @chavelaque.

The Backstory 

Thanks to both nature and nurture, I am a total children’s books nerd. My grandfather was a professor of children’s literature and founded one of the nation’s first children’s author festivals, so I grew up reading kids’ books long after it was socially acceptable to do so. I decided I wanted to go into publishing while I was still in high school; I read Publishers Weekly at Carleton College (where I majored in English, of course); I became an editorial assistant within three months of my college graduation, and I gave my first talk on craft at a writers’ conference fewer than nine months after that.

From August 2000 to January 2017, I worked at Arthur A. Levine Books, an imprint of Scholastic Inc. There I was involved with everything from cheerful picture books to thoughtful young adult novels, and I also served as the continuity editor for the last two books of the Harry Potter series. I moved to Lee & Low Books in March 2017, where I worked closely with the other editors on staff in creating wonderful children's and YA books specifically by and about marginalized groups. I joined Algonquin Young Readers in June 2022. (For more on the books I’ve published and what I'm looking for, please see the Editorial Work page.)

I think of my work as an editor as being a mechanic for stories:  I take books apart, examine their component pieces, and help my authors assemble them again as more elegant and polished machines. My writing for writers, from this point of view, is the instruction manual for the machinery — how I articulate the instincts and knowledge about fiction I’ve gained over nearly two decades of working with writers and their books.

In 2005, I started a blog, Brooklyn Arden, and put up a few talks on the first iteration of this website. The two sites quickly became popular among writers, and in April 2011, I self-published a collection of my best speeches and blog posts, entitled Second Sight:  An Editor’s Talks on Writing, Revising, and Publishing Books for Children and Young Adults. The book went through four printings, but as the years passed, I found myself writing more material and refining and deepening a lot of my thinking about the major components of fiction. I decided to revise it, and that became The Magic Words:  Writing Great Books for Children and Young Adults, which was published by W. W. Norton in September 2016. 

I also write picture books, and my first text, Wings, debuted in Spring 2019 from Atheneum/Simon & Schuster, illustrated by Tomie de Paola. Thunder Trucks, co-written with my best friend Katy Beebe, was published in Fall 2019 by Disney-Hyperion, illustrated by Mike Boldt. A Year of Everyday Wonders, illustrated by Qin Leng, came out in December 2020 from Abrams Books for Young Readers. Most recently, Hamsters Make Terrible Roommates, illustrated by the wonderful Abhi Alwar, made its grumpy way into the world in November 2021 from Dial/Penguin Random House. You can read more about the ideas behind and writing of all of these books here. A fifth book, It’s Hard to Be a Baby, will be published in October 2024 by Abrams BFYR, illustrated by Juana Medina.

If you enjoy the information you find on this site, you should check out the Narrative Breakdown podcast -- now on indefinite hiatus -- which I frequently cohosted alongside producer (and my husband) James Monohan. Some of my favorite episodes for children’s and YA writers include: