Rachel DeWoskin spent her twenties in China as the unlikely star of a nighttime soap opera that inspired her memoir Foreign Babes in Beijing. She has written two novels, Repeat After Me, and Big Girl Small, the coming of age story of a sixteen-year-old with dwarfism. Big Girl Small received the American Library Association's Alex Award, and Rachel's conversations with young readers inspired her to write her first YA novel, Blind. Rachel lives in Chicago and Beijing with her husband, playwright Zayd Dohrn, and their two little girls.
Praise for Blind A profound YA debut -- Publishers Weekly , starred review With traces of John Green's Looking for Alaska . . . a vivid, sensory tour of the shifting landscapes of blindness and teen relationships -- Kirkus , starred review A gracefully written, memorable, and enlightening novel. -- Booklist A well-researched and much-needed story. Emma is a capable heroine who manages her disability with realism and grace. -- School Library Journal More praise for Rachel DeWoskin: Wonderfully engaging . . . captures the way adolescence renders one's own identity somehow unknowable -- The Boston Globe on Big Girl Small Amusing, hypnotic . . . Like a contemporary version of The Wizard of Oz or its coming-of-age antecedent, Alice in Wonderland , Judy's experiences of adolescence are exhilarating, terrifying, and almost uniformly surreal. -- Time Out (New York) on Big Girl Small Cultures don't so much collide as coalesce in DeWoskin's sparkling debut novel . . . Infusing her multicultural narrative with vibrant observations that glitter with laser-intense acuity, DeWoskin demonstrates a smart, sophisticated literary agility. -- Booklist , starred review, on Repeat After Me A tender story of manic love and loss, this is a heartbreaking and uplifting novel with memorably off-kilter leads. -- Publishers Weekly on Repeat After Me An intelligent and complex portrait . . . DeWoskin deserves special praise. -- The Wall Street Journal on Foreign Babes in Beijing