Libba Bray

Libba Bray, born Martha Elizabeth Bray on March 11, 1964, is an American writer of young adult novels. Her work includes the Gemma Doyle Trilogy, Going Bovine, Beauty Queens, The Diviners series, and Under the Same Stars. She was born in Montgomery, Alabama, to a gay Presbyterian minister father and an English teacher mother. Her family later moved to West Virginia for a brief period, then to Corpus Christi, Texas, and finally to Denton, Texas, where she attended high school.

At eighteen, three weeks after graduating from high school, Bray was involved in a serious car accident. Over the next six years, she underwent thirteen surgeries to reconstruct her face, and she has an artificial left eye because of the accident. She went on to graduate from the University of Texas at Austin in 1988 as a theater major. When her childhood best friend, who was living in Manhattan, called to say she needed a roommate, Bray moved to New York City.

Bray’s early work life was tied closely to books before she became widely known as a novelist. Her first job was in the publicity department of Penguin Putnam, followed by three years at Spier, an agency specializing in book advertising. Before writing her first young adult novel under her own name, she had written three books for 17th Street Press using a pseudonym. She was encouraged to write young adult fiction by her husband, Barry Goldblatt, a children’s book agent, and by Ginee Seo, an editor at Simon & Schuster. Bray and Goldblatt share a son, Josh.

Her first novel, A Great and Terrible Beauty, became a New York Times bestseller. She followed it with Rebel Angels and The Sweet Far Thing, completing the Gemma Doyle Trilogy. All three books were national bestsellers for children’s fiction, and A Great and Terrible Beauty and The Sweet Far Thing received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly. In November 2006, a video promoting A Great and Terrible Beauty was part of The Book Standard’s Teen Book Video Awards.

Bray’s Going Bovine, published by Delacorte in 2009, won the Michael L. Printz Award from the American Library Association for literary excellence in young adult literature. The novel is a dark comedy about Cameron, a sixteen-year-old boy with mad cow disease, and his mission with Gonzo, a hypochondriac video gamer with dwarfism, and Dulcie, a punk angel who spray-paints her wings. Beauty Queens, about beauty pageant contestants whose plane crashes on an island, was published by Scholastic Press in May 2011. The Diviners was published on September 18, 2012, followed by Lair of Dreams in August 2015, Before the Devil Breaks You in October 2017, and The King of Crows in February 2020.

What runs through Bray’s public story is a life spent near language, performance, advertising, and books, shaped also by injury, recovery, and movement across several states before New York. Her novels range from historical fantasy to dark comedy to satire, and they have drawn starred reviews from Booklist, Kirkus Reviews, and Publishers Weekly. Readers return to her work for its bold situations, strange humor, and willingness to place young characters inside danger, absurdity, and mystery without smoothing away the hard parts.