Fostering a love of reading in a teenager’s life is an important and worthwhile endeavor. With the prevalence of screens in our day-to-day life it can be easy to forget about the simple pleasures found in sitting down in a quiet place and reading a good book.
This article showcases three local Ann Arbor young adult writers. These authors span different genres of literature from fantasy to mystery to realistic fiction. So, if you have a young adult in your life, this list might just give you the inspiration to pick out a book that they may end up treasuring.
Jennifer Vivekanand
This author started writing her first debut novel in 2020, while recovering from an arm injury, and later published it in 2022 with Cloudberry Ink, a publishing outfit that Vivekanand founded. Her novel is called “Welcome to Nightjar” and tells the story of teenage Zadie Grant who goes to live with a great aunt after she loses her parents. The novel is classified as a thriller, and documents Zadie’s discovery of a big family secret that puts her life in danger. The novel also narrates Zadie’s inability to fit into the world around her, something that most teenagers can most certainly relate to and empathize with.
Vivekanand graduated from the Kendall College of Fine Arts in Michigan and is both an artist and writer.
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Claudia Whitsitt
Whitsitt was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan during the 1960’s and 1970’s and after becoming a special education teacher who loved reading about mysteries, she decided to venture out and write some of her own. Her young adult novels focus on a group of girls in 1960’s Detroit, who are dealing with issues of those times like the Vietnam War and segregation. In one of her more well-known novels “Battle Lines,” a mystery story, the main character Hattie helps her friend uncover the truth of what happened to her stepbrother, Isaac, who went missing during the Vietnam War. According to the author, the book also brings up issues that question the validity of war and fighting.
Shutta Crum
A Kentucky native who grew up with “storytelling in her bones” as she remarks on her website, she was also a high school English teacher as well as a librarian at the Ann Arbor District library before venturing out into the world of writing. She is a prolific author, who writes both children’s books as well as teen novels. She has also been honored to be a guest reader at the White House in 2005. In addition, she completed a book tour of her work at schools on military bases throughout the U.S. in 2010.
One of Shutta’s young adult (YA) books, “Splitting Image,” covers the genre of realistic fiction, and tells the story of a girl who is trying to piece together her identity by finding out who her father is. She is also living in extreme poverty with her grandmother, and tries to make ends meet by charging reporters who come all the way from New York City to write an article about her town.
