Meet Bill Konigsberg

Today we’d like to introduce you to Bill Konigsberg.

Every artist has a unique story. Can you briefly walk us through yours?
I’m an award-winning author of young adult books. I started out as a sports writer for ESPN.com and then The Associated Press. I became the first openly gay sports male at ESPN, and won a GLAAD Media Award in 2001 for my coming out essay “Sports World Still a Struggle for Gays.” I moved on to writing novels for teens as that was always my passion. My first novel, Out of the Pocket, won the Lambda Literary Award in 2009. My second, Openly Straight, won the Sid Flieschman Award for Humor in 2014 and has been translated into five languages. The Pocrupine of Truth was the PEN Center USA Literary Award and Stonewall Book Award in 2016, and the sequel to Openly Straight, Honestly Ben, received three starred reviews in 2017. My next novel, The Music of What Happens, will be released in February of 2019. Oh, and I just had an award named after me! The Assembly on Literature of the National Council of Teachers of English (ALAN/NCTE) just created the annual Bill Konigsberg Award. The full title is The Bill Konigsberg Award for Acts and Activism for Equity and Inclusion Through Young Adult Literature.

Please tell us about your art.
I write novels for young adults, though adults seem to like them, too. The general message of my novels is that authenticity matters. They typically are about characters who are trying to figure out who they are in some way, and what they’re mission is in the world. My novels typically deal with LGBTQ subject matter. Openly Straight and its sequel, Honestly Ben, are about labels, and how they do and don’t embody who we are. Openly Straight is about Rafe, a boy from Boulder, Colorado, who is openly gay and has supportive parents and a school where he’s comfortable, but he’s tired of the label running his life. So, he goes across the country to an all-boys boarding school in Massachusetts to recreate himself without the label. Instead of a “coming out” story, it’s kind of a “going in” story. But what it’s really about is how we all contain multitudes, and how we are more than one thing, but at the same time, when we stop owning some of our labels, life can get complicated in a big way. My next novel, The Music of What Happens, is my first set in Arizona. It’s about two boys, Max and Jordan, who meet one summer while working on a food truck in Mesa. In a lot of ways, it’s about the message’s boys–both gay and straight–get from society, and how those messages can sometimes get in the way of our authentic selves.

Do you have any advice for other artists? Any lessons you wished you learned earlier?
I wish that I’d gotten to the point of embracing what made me unique sooner. I spent so much of my early life as an artist and as a person trying to fit in the box’s society had created for me, and it wasn’t until I started to use the unique voice, I was given that people really started to listen. My advice for other artists is to find that which makes you exactly who and what you are, and fly your flag as high as you can. Be you, always.

How or where can people see your work? How can people support your work?
My books are available at bookstores everywhere and online wherever books are sold.

Contact Info:

• Website: billkonigsberg.com
• Twitter: @billkonigsberg

 
Image Credit:
Headshot by Krystina Moran

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