Biography

New York Times-bestselling author Dashka Slater has been telling stories since she could talk. An award-winning journalist who writes for such publications as The New York Times Magazine and Mother Jones, she is also the author of many books of fiction and non-fiction for children, teenagers, and adults. Her work has been translated into more than fifteen languages and has won many awards, including the Wanda Gág Read Aloud Award.

Dashka’s true crime narrative, The 57 Bus, has received numerous accolades, including the 2018 Stonewall Book Award from the American Library Association, the 2018 Beatty Award from the California Library Association, the California Book Award Gold Award for Young Adult Literature, and a Boston Globe-Horn Book Honor. It was a YALSA Excellence in Nonfiction Award Finalist and an LA Times Book Award Finalist, in addition to receiving four starred reviews and being named to more than twenty separate lists of the year’s best books, including ones compiled by the Washington Post, the New York Public Library, and School Library Journal. In 2021, The 57 Bus was named to Time Magazine’s list of the 100 Best Young Adult Books of All Time.

Dashka’s latest title, Accountable, is a Junior Library Guild Selection and has been called “powerful, timely, and delicately written” by Ibram X. Kendi, the #1 New York Times–bestselling and National Book Award-winning author of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America.

The recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Dashka was also the winner of the 2023 Kurt Vonnegut Speculative Fiction Award.

A frequent speaker at schools, conferences, colleges, and universities, she teaches at Hamline University’s MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults program. She has spent most of her adult life in Oakland, California, where she is always working on far too many writing projects.