Tanya Lee Stone

Tanya Lee Stone is best known for telling little-known or unknown stories of women and people of color. She writes middle grades/young adult narrative nonfiction such as Girl Rising, Almost Astronauts, The Good, the Bad, and the Barbie, and Courage Has No Color, and nonfiction picture books such as Elizabeth Leads the Way, Sandy's Circus, Who Says Women Can't Be Doctors? and The House that Jane Built. Her work has been recognized by the NAACP Image Award, Robert F. Sibert Medal, Golden Kite Award, Bank Street Flora Straus Steiglitz Award, Jane Addams Honor, YALSA Nonfiction Finalist, Boston Globe-Horn Book Honor, NPR Best Books, and NCTE Orbis Pictus Honors. She is also the author of the YA verse novel, A Bad Boy Can Be Good for a Girl, which was a Top Ten Banned Book. For more information about Tanya, please visit tanyastone.com. 

Tanya's Process

Transcript of interview
 We interviewed Tanya Lee Stone asking questions about her research and writing process for Almost Astronauts. In the recording, you can hear Tanya,
  • ​explain how she first encountered the story of the Mercury 13 women while doing research on Ilan Ramon, the first Israeli astronaut,
  • ​talk about the weekend she spent with several of the Mercury 13 women,
  • share how she arrived at the unconventional format of interwoven stories for this book,
  • explain how her propensity to skip over technical descriptions she found boring as a young reader informs her writing decisions,
  • discuss how what we read and what we experience through film and music changes us and our understanding of the world.

Tanya's Books

Other Interviews and  Resources about Tanya