About

The medium-sized bio:

Misa Sugiura’s ancestors include a poet, a priestess, a samurai, and a stowaway. Her first novel It’s Not Like It’s A Secret, won the Asian Pacific Islander American Librarians’ Association’s Award for Young Adult Literature; her highly acclaimed second novel, This Time Will Be Different, made the Best of 2019 lists of YALSA, Kirkus Reviews, the New York Public Library, and the Chicago Public Library. Her short story, “Where I’m From” appears in Come On In, a young adult anthology of stories about immigration. Her latest book, Love & Other Natural Disasters has been praised by the American Library Association as “hilariously awkward” and “honestly poignant.”

Misa was born in Chicago, earned a B.A. in English at Princeton University, and taught English as a second language in Japan before moving back to the States to earn her M.Ed at Stanford University. She taught English at a local public high for several years before “retiring” to be a stay-at-home parent. Currently, she lives and writes under a giant oak tree with her husband, two sons, and two cats. You can find her online at misasugiura.com and @misallaneous1 on Twitter and Instagram.

The very long, personal bio:

I was born in Chicago, Illinois to Japanese immigrants. We moved to the suburbs when I was three, and I grew up in an almost-all-white town and went to almost-all-white schools. It was actually a very nice life: there was a field with wild strawberries and a pony at the end of my street, and a pond across the street where we caught tadpoles in the summer and went ice skating in the winter. But as one of the only Asian kids in my school, I often felt like an outsider. Also, I was just a weird kid. I spent a lot of time with my head buried in a book, or just in my own imagination.

Speaking of books, I’ve loved reading for as long as I can remember; some of my earliest memories are of poring over the pictures in the Mother Goose book that my mother read to me so that I would hear English and be ready for nursery school. In first grade, my childhood across-the-street friend introduced me to Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series, which I remember with great fondness (though we now understand them to espouse problematic attitudes about Native Americans), Shel Silverstein’s Where the Sidewalk Ends, E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web, Fred Gwynne’s A Chocolate Moose for Dinner, and a lovely (now out of print and probably also problematic) book of verse by William Cole, entitled Beastly Boys and Ghastly Girls.

I loved writing, too. My first love was poetry, maybe as a result of all that Mother Goose. I loved the intricacies of word choice and rhythm—aspects of writing that I still love to work with, even in prose. I never wrote stories unless they were assigned, though I did start a chapter book with a friend in fourth or fifth grade; it was inspired by Mary Norton’s The Borrowers, and it was about a group of little dolls who come to life at night and have adventures. My alter ego was Emily, a smart, athletic, popular girl/doll with long blond braids and blue eyes, which should tell you quite a lot about who and what I longed to be.

There was a very long period (decades!) when I didn’t see myself as the creative writing type. That period began when I started focusing on taking the “right” classes to get into a Good College, and ended when I challenged myself to write a novel at age 46. You hear about writers and artists who say things like, “I write because I have to write. The story/poem demands to be written. The characters demand to be heard.” That has never been me. Ever. I have to choose to write, to force myself to think about who my characters are and what their story is.

Outside of writing, I’ve also always been a swimmer. I joined a swim team when I was eleven, and it took me all the way through college. After college, I went to Japan for three years to teach English at Kobe Jogakuin High School, and then returned to the U.S. to get a teaching certificate and a Masters degree in education. I taught high school English for several years in Santa Clara, CA before I had kids, and after several years of focusing on parenting, I decided to try writing a novel. Luckily for me, the author thing worked out, and here I am today, writing my very long bio!