Rebecca Stead

Biography

Rebecca Stead grew up in New York City and worked as a public defender before becoming a full-time writer. When You Reach Me won the Newbery Medal in 2010, the highest honor in American children's literature. Stead has described the novel as growing partly from her love of A Wrinkle in Time, which she read as a child and which forms the novel's central intertextual layer. The 1978 setting is the period of her own childhood, and the New York City of the novel — rougher, more economically precarious, more neighborhood-scaled — is drawn from memory.

Rebecca Stead at a glance