R. M. Romero (she/they) is a Jewish Latina and internationally bestselling author of fairy tales for children and adults. She lives in Miami Beach with her cat, Robin Goodfellow, and spends her summers helping to maintain Jewish cemeteries in Europe. Her work has been named an Indie Next Pick, a Jewish National Book Award Finalist, a two time Sydney Taylor Notable Book, a Carnegie Award nominee, a Best Book the Year by Kirkus, BCCB, Bank Street College of Education, SLJ, the New York Public Library, and the Chicago Public Library, and received multiple starred reviews.

  • Rachael!

  • I’ve been making up stories for my entire life and decided that I wanted to be an author more than anything in middle school. When I moved back to my childhood home to finish graduate school, I rediscovered my love for the incredible books I had grown up reading and decided to try my hand at writing for kids myself.

  • The characters in my books tend to appear in my imagination fully formed and I follow them wherever they take me, which is often to surprising places! Traveling, music, or reading non-fiction often generates the spark for a story, too.

  • The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo, The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, The Eyes of the Dragon by Stephen King, Dangerous Angels by Francesca Lia Block, Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer, All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell and Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman, Deathless by Catherynne M. Valente, The Lost Girl by Anne Ursu, The Wild Ones by Nafiza Azad, In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado.

  • Always take time out of your life to write, even if it’s just a few lines here and there. It takes a very long time to write an entire book, but every word moves you closer to the end–always keep that in mind! And maybe, just maybe, the story you are terrified to write is the story you shouldbe writing.