Beth Kephart

When her senior year is interrupted by an unplanned pregnancy, Kenzie is sent to Spain to await her baby's birth and adoption, a painful situation that is aided by new friendships and a growing awareness of the decisions she faces. By the author of You Are My Only.

Small Damages

A memoir-writing guide offers writing lessons and examples for those interested in putting their memories down on paper, explains the difference between remembering and imagining, and describes the language of truth.

On the Writing of Memoir

Handling the Truth

On Haven, a six-mile long, half-mile-wide stretch of barrier island, Mira Banul and her Year-Rounder friends have proudly risen to every challenge. But then a superstorm defies all predictions and devastates the island, upending all logic and stranding Mira's mother and brother on the mainland. Nothing will ever be the same. A stranger appears in the wreck of Mira's home. A friend obsessed with vanishing disappears. As the mysteries deepen, Mira must find the strength to carry on—to somehow hold her memories in place while learning to trust a radically reinvented future. Gripping and poetic, This Is the Story of You is about the beauty of nature and the power of family, about finding hope in the wake of tragedy and recovery in the face of overwhelming loss.

This Is the Story of You

Like a modern-day Cyrano de Bergerac, Elisa ghostwrites love notes for the boys in her school. But when Elisa falls for Theo Moses, things change fast. Theo asks for verses to court the lovely Lila—a girl known for her beauty, her popularity, and a cutting ability to remind Elisa that she has none of these. At home, Elisa's father, the one person she feels understands her, has left on an extended business trip. As the days grow shorter, Elisa worries that the increasingly urgent letters she sends her father won't bring him home. Like the undercover agent she feels she has become, Elisa retreats to a pond in the woods, where her talent for ice-skating gives her the confidence to come out from under cover and take center stage. But when Lila becomes jealous of Theo's friendship with Elisa, her revenge nearly destroys Elisa's ice-skating dreams and her plan to reunite her family. National Book Award nominee Beth Kephart's first young adult novel is a stunning debut.

Undercover

Tells, in their separate voices and at a space of fourteen years, of Emmy, whose baby has been stolen, and Sophie, a teenager who defies her nomadic, controlling mother by making friends with a neighbor boy and his elderly aunts.

You Are My Only

Something is not right with Nadia Cara. While spending a year in Florence, Italy, she's become a thief. She has secrets. And when she tries to speak, the words seem far away. Nadia finds herself trapped by her own obsessions and following the trail of an elusive Italian boy whom only she has seen. Can Nadia be rescued or will she simply lose herself altogether? Set against the backdrop of a glimmering city, One Thing Stolen is an exploration of obsession, art, and a rare neurological disorder. It is a celebration of language, beauty, imagination, and the salvation of love.

One Thing Stolen

It is February 1983, and Berlin is a divided city with a miles-long barricade separating east from west. But the city isn't the only thing that is divided. Ada lives among the rebels, punkers, and immigrants of Kreuzberg in West Berlin. Stefan lives in East Berlin, in a faceless apartment bunker of Friedrichshain. Bound by love and separated by circumstance, their only chance for a life together lies in a high-risk escape. But will Stefan find the courage to leap? Or will forces beyond his control stand in his way? National Book Award finalist Beth Kephart presents a story of daring and sacrifice, and love that will not wait.

Going Over

What are we supposed to do with that lovely, infuriating, instigating, mischievous blank page? Who are we, when we're being uncommonly honest? Where do we stand, in the landscape of truth? How do we discover and profess the story of our life when lives are such strange and messy things? Frankly, why bother? In Tell the Truth. Make It Matter., a one-of-a-kind memoir workbook, Beth Kephart offers an insider's look at the making of true tales--and an illustrated workbook to guide the wild ride. Combining smartly selected samples with abundantly fresh ideas, dozens of original exercises with cautions, questions with answers, Kephart inspires, encourages, and persistently believes in those with a story to tell. Write this, the workbook says. Read this. Consider this. Discover who you are. Have some honest fun with words. Truth could not come from a more authoritative source--Beth Kephart, who, as an award-winning writer of 22 books, an award-winning teacher at the University of Pennsylvania, a winner of the 2013 Books for a Better Life Award (motivational category) for Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir, a nationally renowned speaker, and a partner in Juncture Writing Workshops, has mastered the art of leading readers and writers toward the stories of themselves. Truth should find a home among high school teachers, college professors, workshop leaders, autodidacts, secret writers and public ones. It is the perfect (graduation, birthday, holiday, friendship) gift--to others, and to oneself.

A Memoir Writing Workbook

Tell the Truth. Make It Matter

In a range of provocative and personal essays, memoir writer and teacher Beth Kephart offers new ideas about locating our past, developing self-portraits, writing the other, generating telling details, refining scenes, and building obsession vessels, among other topics; considers a myriad of memoir forms and writing strategies; relates the privileges, priorities, heartaches, and hopes of the writer's life; and offers an arrangement of question cascades and exercises designed to carry readers into and through their own true stories. Kephart is a National Book Award finalist and an acclaimed memoir writer (Wife Daughter Self), an award-winning teacher of memoir at the University of Pennsylvania, a widely published essayist (Catapult, Literary Hub, The New York Times, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere), and co-founder of Juncture Workshops. More at bethkephartbooks.com.

The Master Memoir Class

We Are the Words

The threat of two escaped convicts and a missing friend lead Lizzie on a harrowing journey through the wilds of the Adirondacks.

Wild blues

In this lively, lyrical picture book biography, meet the groundbreaking, outspoken, legendary editor of the best-loved books for children, and see how she inspired Maurice Sendak, Margaret Wise Brown, and others to create Where the Wild Things Are, Good Night Moon, and many more classics. "Ursula Nordstrom was a grown-up who never forgot what it was to be a child." The girl who'd always loved to read would grow up to work in the Department of Books for Boys and Girls at Harper & Brothers Publishers. Soon she was editing books by Margaret Wise Brown and E. B. White, discovering new talent like John Steptoe and Maurice Sendak, and reinventing what a book for children should be. "Children want to be seen," she'd tell her writers. "Not good enough for you," she'd scribble in the margins of their manuscripts, asking them to revise. Her favorite books of all? "Good books for bad children," she'd say. And those books went on to win every award imaginable, including the Caldecott and Newbery Medals and the National Book Award.

The Genius of Ursula Nordstrom

Good Books for Bad Children

After her mother's death, sixteen-year-old Katie copes with her grief by working in the garden of an old estate, where she becomes intrigued by the story of a reclusive millionaire, while her father, an art restorer, manages in his own way to come to terms with the death of his wife.

Nothing but ghosts

Bonnie Jo Campbell

Cat Warren

Diane Lefer

Carol Guess

Sybil Baker

Ethel Rohan

Kim Chinquee

Kathleen Rooney

Tama Janowitz

Kathi Appelt

Sherrie Flick

Victoria Redel

Robin Black

Deb Olin Unferth

Kathy Fish

Molly Gaudry

Debra Di Blasi

Xu Xi

Ellen Meister

Jennifer Steil

Amina Gautier

Jo-Ann Mapson

Elaine Chiew

Tara Laskowski

Kristine Ong Muslim

Natasha Saje

Roberta Allen

Susanna Sonnenberg

Pamela Painter

Jillian Sullivan

Nancy Stohlman

Liza Gardner Walsh

Tara Campbell

Patricia McConnell

Lisa Kastner

Ellen Boscov

Kristin Burcham

Sara Chansarkar

Mare Chapman

Watsuki Harrington

Tara Masih

Robin OIivera

Alina Pleskova

Zalisa Rabin

Trisha Rodriguez

C. J. Spataro

Wendy Stetson

Chelsea Stickle

Julia Strayer

Girija Tripp

Fifty-two writers responded in exactly 100 words to the fine art photography of Meg Boscov to create an anthology of healing visions.

An Anthology of Micro Writing and Fine Art Photography

Healing Visions

Seventeen-year-old Mira lives in a small island beach town off the coast of New Jersey year-round, and when a devastating superstorm strikes she will face the storm's wrath and the destruction it leaves behind alone.

This is the story of you

Fourteen-year-old Sophie and her best friends Wyatt and K set out to help when a silent, mysterious girl in a homemade hot air balloon lands in rural Gilbertine.

Cloud Hopper

The author shares her experiences of loving a child with special needs in an account that describes life with an autistic child, her and her husband's quest to help their son, and his struggle to become a part of the world

One Child's Courage

A Slant of Sun

M. T. Anderson

Chris Lynch

Jacqueline Woodson

An Na

K. L. Going

Six award-winning young adult authors present short stories featuring teens who have to face the "real world" for the first time.

No Such Thing as the Real World

During one of her daily visits across town to visit her dying grandfather, fifteen-year-old Rosie discovers a dance studio that helps her find a way to bring her family members together.

House of Dance

Set against the backdrop of the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, Katherine cannot forgive herself when her beloved twin sister dies, and she feels that her only course of action is to follow suit.

Dangerous Neighbors

When a troubled children’s book author moves to their farm, two kids with troubles of their own hatch a scheme to swipe the ending of the final book in a bestselling series to get a reward from the book’s publisher in this gorgeously written novel in the tradition of Wonder and Out of My Mind. Twelve-year-old Sara and her brother Hawk are told that they are not to bother the man—The Mister—who just moved into the silo apartment on their farm. It doesn’t matter that they know nothing about him and they think they ought to know something. It doesn’t matter that he’s always riding that unicycle around. Mama told them no way, no how are they to bother The Mister unless they want to be in a mess of trouble. Trouble is the last thing Sara and her brother need. Sara’s got a condition, you see. Marfan syndrome. And that Marfan syndrome is causing her heart to have problems, the kind of problems that require surgery. But the family already has problems: The drought has dried up their crops and their funds, which means they can’t afford any more problems, let alone a surgery to fix those problems. Sara can feel the weight of her family’s worry, and the weight of her time running out, but what can a pair of kids do? Well, it all starts with…bothering The Mister.

The Great Upending

Beth Kephart

About

Books

Join the club