Gene Luen Yang

Author and Illustrator Gene Luen Yang believes that reading and writing books is a great way for him to step outside his comfort zone, push himself to discover new places, and to meet people he wouldn’t have expected to connect with.

To get more kids reading and kids reading more, Author and Illustrator Gene Luen Yang offers his Reading Without Walls Challenge, which helps kids learn more about diverse people and ideas outside their personal experiences.

Author and Illustrator Gene Luen Yang believes that reading about someone who seems different , even on the surface, highlights our common humanity … one of the most powerful aspects of literature.

Author and Illustrator Gene Luen Yang loathed sports growing up but through books, his dislike of the sport transformed.

Author and Illustrator Gene Luen Yang encourages his own kids as he does kids all across the country to take the Reading Without Walls Challenge … finding and embracing books outside their comfort zone.

As diehard comic book fans, Author and Illustrator Gene Luen Yang and a friend would sneak to the comic book store and smuggle them home in oversized library books.

From the time he could read and started loving books, Author and Illustrator Gene Luen Yang has kept an “awesome shelf” of books. One book on that shelf about graphic novels convinced him that the medium of comics/graphic novels could carry any story he wanted to tell.

Author and Illustrator Gene Luen Yang remembers vividly characters from Dr. Suess as well as from comic books that impacted him as a child and still as an adult.

“It doesn’t matter how quickly or slowly you read. What matters is that you love the act of reading,” says Author and Illustrator Gene Luen Yang.

As a computer scientist, Author and Illustrator Gene Luen Yang says the way he can explain the specialness of a printed book is that it can have both sequential access and random access … meaning, the reader can read the story in order or can jump around.

As a kid, Author and Illustrator Gene Luen Yang often felt “in between.” Not surprisingly, most of his books are based on the theme of finding oneself.

Author and Illustrator Gene Luen Yang did pull heavily from his own experiences growing up between Chinese and American cultures when writing his graphic novel American Born Chinese.

“Can you write a character who is very different from you?” Author and Illustrator Gene Luen Yang understands the challenges around writing characters different from oneself, but it can be done with research, input from people who have lived that life experience, and humility.

“Superheroes at their best express America,” says Author and Illustrator Gene Luen Yang.

Author and Illustrator Gene Luen Yang on the value of educational comics.

When kids tell Author and Illustrator Gene Luen Yang they, too, want to be cartoonists, he half-jokes that they will have to give up all of their TV time and half of their friends because writing graphic novels is extremely labor intensive.

Teachers have found using graphic novels like those of Author and Illustrator Gene Luen Yang in certain settings like for students learning a second language or for reluctant readers can be an effective teaching tool.

The world needs diverse books. Author and Illustrator Gene Luen Yang says that every kid needs a book that is a mirror and a book that is a window. 

Authors and illustrators Gene Luen Yang and Thien Pham recommend other great books for those who love Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor and Park.

Authors and illustrators Gene Luen Yang and Thien Pham talk about whether the young characters in Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor and Park found a happy ending.

Authors and illustrators Gene Luen Yang and Thien Pham consider what Eleanor’s postcard said in Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor and Park.

Authors and illustrators Gene Luen Yang and Thien Pham look at the love story of the young characters in Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor and Park through the lens of today.

Authors and illustrators Gene Luen Yang and Thien Pham discuss the possibility of true love for the young characters in Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor and Park.