Karis Rogerson

By Karis Rogerson

April 3, 2025

Writing a compelling Young Adult book can be a challenge—a fun challenge, but a tricky one nonetheless! Every year, more than 35 million YA novels are sold. These books are geared toward tweens and teens, an audience who deserve to see themselves accurately reflected in the books they pick up.

So, how do you make your teenage characters feel authentic? There are a lot of ways to answer that question. You could probably write an entire book and just talk about t...

Learn from my mistakes, friends! I spent nearly nine years querying five different projects, sending hundreds of individual requests over the years. I queried esteemed agents who’d been at their agencies for decades and I queried brand-new agents who’d just opened their inboxes. I received rejections within minutes and I received rejections after over a year in the slush pile.
Over the course of those nine years, I made plenty of mistakes. At the end of the day, I still wound up with 13 full ...

I have written and revised seven novels, and for the majority of them, I was either a full-time student, working full-time, or doing school while working full-time. I’ve written my books in the wee hours of the night, early mornings, and during the breaks between other commitments.
Whether you’re juggling undergrad, pursuing a Master’s degree, working a demanding 9-5 — or some combination of the above — you’ll know that it’s incredibly hard to find the time to write novels in the midst of eve...

By Karis Rogerson
Karis Rogerson is a writer and reader who’s been writing novels and trying to get them published for over a decade. In this column, she’ll be taking you along with her, starting at the beginning of her writing journey, as she continues working on new projects in the hopes that someday, you can hold them in your hands!
It’s been nearly 25 years since I was an elementary school student who looked at my teacher and said, with all the ambition and faith in the world, that I was ...

Almost five whole days passed between the moment To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before dropped on Netflix (Friday, August 17, at 3 a.m. EST/12 a.m. PST, a glorious date and time indeed) and the moment I finally clicked “play.”
It’s not that I didn’t want to watch it the second it came out; I have been waiting, breathlessly, for the movie’s release for what feels like eons (technically only three years, but still), and I knew it was going to be good, because the promos and trailers had floored me ...

It took me a long time to come out, even to myself. After growing up extremely evangelical and in an incredible heteronormative culture, it took ages to realize that maybe I wasn’t straight, actually; I was just socialized that way. Along the way, queer stories brought me light, love, and comfort. It wasn’t until much later that I started to realize these stories comforted me because I saw myself in them. And since coming out, to myself and to the world (Twitter), I’ve continued to find joy a...

There’s something about knowing you’re not alone on the journey that makes it a million times easier.
By journey, I mean life in the grander scheme, but also publishing, book-loving-and-writing, blogging...that journey as well.
For a long time after graduating undergrad, I felt alone in my writing. I had writer friends, but they were journalist writer friends. I had left all my novelists behind when I donned my cap and gown to receive my diploma, and it was hard to find them again.
Ultimately...

Original photo by Rahul Pandit
I wasn’t always a book lover. In fact, when my mom first started teaching me to read, I went down kicking and screaming — metaphorically, of course. I have this clear memory of sitting in my bedroom in our apartment when the door opened and she walked in with one of those learn-to-read books, and I just pitched the mother of all fits. She says I didn’t pitch a fit, but I remember it that way and hey, this is my story.
But after I learned, it’s like some sort of ...

Header image via Nataliya Vaitkevich
It’s the first days of December and you’re celebrating, because in November you accomplished something truly stupendous — you wrote 50,000 words (or more!!! a hero) of a novel in thirty days.
The first thing I’d say you ought to do after winning NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is take a beat and simply celebrate your accomplishment. It’s possible that while you were in the weeds of drafting in a mad dash, surrounded by the NaNo community and all t...

Happy National Encourage a Young Writer Day!
What a fun holiday to celebrate.
I knew I wanted to be a writer before I started middle school. I was always obsessed with stories—I remember being a kid begging my parents to tell me my favorite ones over and over and over again—and as soon as I learned to read, I became obsessed with imbibing them through books. It wasn’t long before I realized that I wanted to tell stories that way, too. I decided on writing books as a career early in life, and ...

Header images via Xi Xi & Ali Alcantara
I’ve made it no secret, over the years I’ve lived and written for the internet, that I have depression. Some of my first published articles, back in 2015 and 2016, were about life with depression, and life trying to be a writer, and the way those two identities coalesced and often crashed into each other. So I guess it makes sense that I’m finally sitting down to explore what it means to be a writer with depression.
I know I’m not alone in this. In 2020...

About a month ago I was at my second grad school residency (the first to be in-person). Before going I’d made a goal to read my work aloud at every opportunity; and so over the course of 10 days in Vermont, I read the opening to a first draft of a YA novel on two separate occasions; read a very personal poem about depression; read some poems from my senior year of high school; and read work that I’d created over the course of the residency itself.
Which all adds up to five different reading e...

What’s better than being high school sweethearts who grew up and got married? Why, being high school sweethearts who grew up, got married, and went on to write more than 10 romance novels for teens and adults. That’s the story behind power writing duo Emily Wibberley & Austin Siegemun-Broka, whose latest novel, Heiress Takes All, is a heist adventure story that takes place during the main character’s father’s wedding. She Reads is honored to present a Q&A with the authors to celebrate the rel...

It seems like every day there’s a new slate of bad news for the queer community in the United States. From anti-trans legislation in Texas to the Florida governor signing the “Don’t Say Gay” bill to books being pulled off shelves—nationwide—for no reason other than who their writers are: queer authors, authors of color, and queer authors of color. It’s an unending slew of depressing headlines.
I feel helpless. When I hear the governor of Florida claim that discussion of sexual identity in sch...

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