Veera Hiranandani is the award-winning author of several books for young people. Her most recent middle-grade novel, Amil and The After, is a follow-up to her Newbery Honor winner, The Night Diary. The Night Diary also received the Walter Dean Myers Honor Award, the Malka Penn Award for Human Rights in Children's Literature, and several other honors and state reading list awards. Her middle-grade historical novel, How to Find What You're Not Looking For, received the Sydney Taylor Book Award, the Jane Addams Book Award, and the New York Historical Society Children's Book Prize among other accolades. She earned her MFA in fiction writing at Sarah Lawrence College. A former book editor, she's now a faculty member with the MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults program at The Vermont College of Fine Arts.