Lisa Moore Ramee wrote her first book in second grade. It took some time before she got around to writing her second one. A Good Kind of Trouble, her debut novel, published in Spring 2019. Something to Say came out in July, 2020 and Mapmaker will hit shelves in 2022.
Outside Lisa’s childhood bedroom was a hallway lined with bookcases. It was like having a magical portal to thousands of other worlds right outside her door. She read everything. Fantasy, contemporary, adventure, mystery, classics, romance. Kids books, adult books—some that her mother took out of Lisa’s room and hid because they were too mature.
And when Lisa wasn’t reading, she was in her room pretending. Picturing herself in the stories she read. Instead of writing fan fiction, she practiced fan drama. Creating complicated further adventures of her favorite characters, with herself planted right in the midst of it. Things went a little sideways when in fifth grade, after reading Harriet the Spy, she started carrying around a notebook, and scribbling thoughts about her classmates. You can guess what happened. The notebook was found, friendships were broken. Lisa learned a valuable lesson: keep the notebook at home.
Skip ahead many years later and while getting her MA in English Literature, Lisa discovered her words didn’t need to stay hidden any longer. And could even be a source of joy.
She started writing short pieces and even got a few published online and then tried her hand at a novel. The first one was an adult horror story, due to her long love of Stephen King novels, but she couldn’t quite capture the darkness King is such a master of. She sputtered around with other tales and finally settled on a book about a young girl struggling to figure out how race impacted her life. As a Black girl going to predominantly white schools, Lisa had similar questions growing up, and although A Good Kind of Trouble isn’t auto-biographical, it does capture some of the confusion and questions Lisa had about friendship and romance and race at that time.
Originally hailing from Los Angeles, CA, Lisa now lives in Northern California with her husband, two kids, big cat, and more yard than she can control.
