I hope that people understand just how gutsy it was to write an LGBQT+ novel in the early 2000s.” Wendy Schmalz, Peters’s agent shared this with Publishers Weekly, “Julie wasn’t just a talented writer. She explored issues of gender identity, sexual orientation, divorce, and depression with both humanity and humor,” Tingley said. “LGBTQ+ readers needed their own Judy Blume and, to me, Julie was it. “Who’d buy it? Who’d read it? There was no market for queer literature.” Fear consumed her while she waited for a reply, certain the book would be rejected by her agent and editor. Then she mailed the manuscript to her agent. For 18 months I immersed myself in the story and characters,” Peters told Write or Die. Of course, I wasn’t going to submit it or anything. That book was the most fun I ever had writing. “It’d take a year before I found the courage to sit down and write Keeping You a Secret. She lived in Colorado, a very conservative, red state at the time. Peters at first resisted the idea, though her family and close friends knew she was gay, she didn’t publicize it. In a 2020 interview with Jessie Orcutt for Write or Die Magazine, Peters shared her journey in writing Keeping You a Secret, a topic suggested by her Little Brown editor, Tingley. In 2003, Peters published Keeping You a Secret (Little Brown), a “moving, classic love story between two girls.” For context, less than a decade earlier, Nancy Garden’s Annie on My Mind had been banned and burned by demonstrators in Kansas City because it focused on two teen girls falling in love.
Peters’ first YA novel was Define “Normal” (Little Brown, 2000), a “funny and heart-wrenching story about two girls from different crowds who find common ground.” It was well received, garnering ALA accolades including Best Books for YA, Popular Paperbacks for YA and Quick Pick for Reluctant YA Readers. Then, in the early 2000s Peters shifted to writing for young adults, “she found her true voice,” Tingley told Publishers Weekly. They worked on several middle grade books together in the 1990s. Peters first book, The Stinky Sneakers Contest (Little Brown, 1992), was plucked from the slushpile by Megan Tingley, her first fiction acquisition.
Julie Anne Peters, the critically-acclaimed, award-winning author of more than a dozen books for young adults and children died March 21 at the age of 71.
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