King is the only author ever to win the Michael L. Printz Medal twice, having won it again in 2024 for The Collectors, a story anthology, making it the only anthology that has ever won the Printz. She has published many other highly-acclaimed novels including 2021’s SW/TCH, 2020 Michael L. Printz Award winner and LA Times Book Prize finalist DIG, 2016’s Still Life with Tornado, 2015’s surrealist I Crawl Through It, Glory O’Brien’s History of the Future, Reality Boy, the 2012 Los Angeles Times Book Prize winner Ask the Passengers, Everybody Sees the Ants, 2011 Michael L. Printz Honor Book Please Ignore Vera Dietz among others. She also writes acclaimed and bestselling Middle Grade Fiction as Amy Sarig King.
In her book Attack of the Black Rectangles, Amy takes on censorship and intolerance in a novel she was born to write. When Mac first opens his classroom copy of Jane Yolen’s The Devil’s Arithmetic and finds some words blacked out, he thinks it must be a mistake. But then when he and his friends discover what the missing words are, he’s outraged. Someone in his school is trying to prevent kids from reading the full story. But who? Even though his unreliable dad tells him to not get so emotional about a book (or anything else), Mac has been raised by his mom and grandad to call out things that are wrong. He and his friends head to the principal’s office to protest the censorship… but her response doesn’t take them seriously. So many adults want Mac to keep his words to himself. Mac’s about to see the power of letting them out.
Her newest book, Pick the Lock (September 2024), is a weird and insightful novel about a girl intent on picking the lock of her toxic family. King also won another Michael L. Printz Award for The Collectors: Stories, where she and an all-star team of contributors created an anthology of stories about remarkable people and their strange and surprising collections.
She is a former faculty member of several MFA writing programs and spends many months of the year traveling the country speaking to high school and university students, educators, and humans who care about the mental health of young people. She has recently launched a non-profit, Gracie’s House, which provides and maintains safe spaces for LGBTQ+ youth in rural areas.
