This month I had the pleasure of interviewing Martha Engber, whose new novel Winter Light won the 2021 Gold Medal IPPY Award for Young Adult Fiction. Adding to the fun was discovering that we both grew up in the Chicago suburbs around the same time–which turns out to be the setting for Winter Light, the story 15-year-old Mary Donahue, a smart but troubled kid navigating the brutal hand life has dealt her.

Engber who received a journalism degree before working as a freelance reporter for the Chicago Tribune, St. Louis Post-Dispatch and other national publications, is also also a freelance editor and workshop facilitator. Her writing career has included work in a wide variety of genres, including newspaper articles, poems, essays, and plays.