Alumni Spotlight

After Anna Sortino graduated from DePaul’s Master of Arts in Writing and Publishing (MAWP) program in 2019, she applied for a publishing mentorship program called Pitch Wars (which is now defunct) and was picked by renowned YA author Aiden Thomas. At the time, the program was encouraging authors to write stories inspired by their own lives and identities, which ultimately pushed Sortino to write stories centered with disabled characters living their lives and falling in love. She has published two YA books—Give Me A Sign (2023 via Penguin Random House) and On The Bright Side (2024 via Penguin Random House)—with another set for release on May 19, 2026, titled Stops Along The Way. Sortino’s books have won an ALA Schneider Family Book Award Honor, the Yellowhammer Young Adult Book Award, and the Garden State Teen Book Award, and have earned starred reviews from the likes of Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and many others.

Sortino visited DePaul on Thursday, January 15, 2026, for a Q&A with graduates in the MFA and MAWP program. Ahead of her author chat, we sat down with Sortino to discuss her experience at DePaul, what keeps her sane as a full-time author, what projects she’s currently working on, and so much more.
 

Ex Libris: What led you to DePaul, and what was your experience like in the MAWP program?

I had done my undergrad on the East Coast and studied film and Political Science and then graduated in December 2016 at probably the worst time to be in Washington, DC. I moved back to Chicago, which is where I’m originally from, and I got a job that I hated because it had nothing to do with anything I had studied. But that job paid for grad school. So, while all my colleagues were going to get their MBAs or their computer science degrees, I was like, ‘you know what? I want to keep studying writing. I want to see what’s out there for me.’

I really loved that DePaul had a variety of classes, like I could take poetry, short story, and memoir. There was a lot that intrigued me about all the different courses, but specifically the novels course. I attended DePaul on top of working full time. I don’t know how I did that, but somehow it all worked out. I had a good group of friends that were really supportive. But overall, I would say the novels class 100% changed my life in the sense that, because I came from a film and journalism background, getting enough words on the page was always the trickiest part. And you learn that by the end of the class, you’re going to have a draft. It’s going to technically be book form. It was a lot of work to make it something, but that opened so many doors for me. What I wrote for that class didn’t end up going anywhere, but it got a lot of interest from agents, and in a way that proved to myself that I could do it, and then I had the grit to turn around and immediately write something new.
 

You graduated from DePaul in 2019 right before the pandemic. Did that impact your writing or career in any way?

Right after graduating, I moved to Los Angeles, and around the same time publishing kicked off for me when I found this mentorship program called Pitch Wars, which unfortunately no longer exists. But I found it at the height of its success, where you could get mentored by an existing author if you got picked. So, I finished grad school, gave up on my thesis book, found out about this program, saw that the deadline was like two months away, wrote a shitty first draft in two months of a brand-new project. I somehow ended up getting picked by a mentor, who happened to be Aiden Thomas, who is like a superstar in the YA world.

I had to take this draft and turn it into something that agents would want to see in three months. At the end of the program was a showcase, which was in February 2020… All the stakes were on this showcase, and my book actually did very well in the showcase. It got a lot of requests, but then the world shut down.

I ended up getting an agent by May, but those three months felt like a decade. It was so stressful and I thought I had done all that work for nothing. Even when I got the agent, we went on submission later that year, and got a lot of nice feedback from editors, but nothing happened right away. No one was acquiring anything in 2020. It wasn’t actually until the following year when we went out on submission, and then finally got a deal.

Through lots of different life circumstances, I ended up leaving my job a year or two later. And honestly now I’m just kind of flying by the seat of my pants. Publishing is somehow paying me just enough to keep doing it full time year after year, but that doesn’t make it any less scary. I remember in grad school, Rebecca Johns-Trissler’s number one thing was, ‘Don’t quit your day job.’ And I will swear to that because it’s not an ideal circumstance. While I love the freedom and flexibility I have with it being my full-time situation, it’s scary because then you have to sell the next project.
 

What does your day-to-day look like as a full-time author?

I am over-reliant on athletics. I’m training for the Chicago Marathon. If I choose not to work out on any given day, I’m probably also not going to write that day. It’s one of those things where they really go hand in hand for me.

I’m usually juggling a couple of different projects at once. And it’s taken me several years to discern that I don’t like hopping between different projects at the same time. I’d rather take a week to work on project A and then a week to work on Project B. I need a few days to switch my brain from one to the other. In the past, I lost so many days of work just because I was switching between things. It can get tricky with different deadlines. I have a lot of good author friends, and we keep each other motivated, and some of them are in the same boat of technically being full time authors. So, it’s very helpful to have the support group of people who are also like, ‘Hey, let’s all get on Zoom and write together for an hour.’ It’s that accountability, because even if it’s something you really want to do, when you set your own schedule, the world is full of distractions.
 

What led you to the YA genre, and centering your stories on disabled characters?

The book I wrote in grad school was an adult historical fiction novel that looks like nothing I’ve published so far. But back in 2019 there was a really big push for “Own Voices”, which is a categorization that isn’t quite used anymore. But it was basically saying, if this book is about this identity, we want it written by that same identity. In the disability space, the books I had read were often written by parents of a disabled person and almost never by someone who’s disabled. So that was what really lit the fire under me for the mentorship program. I have hearing aids. I’ve had them my whole life. But if I would lore drop and tell people I went to Deaf summer camp, they’d be surprised. I wasn’t sure how to go about making it an interesting story, until I realized there was tension in an experience like mine that I could pull from wearing hearing aids and floating between the hearing and Deaf worlds. Even people who don’t have any experience with disability can identify with the feeling of being caught between worlds that’s explored in my debut.

In one of my very last grad school classes, I was already considering the idea of writing about this subject matter, but in my head, it was a dark adult book, like a Jodi Picoult thing. One of my friends just looked at me and said, ‘that’s a YA book. That’s a summer camp YA book.’ And that set me on the right path. The funniest part too, though, is after having written that and querying the first batch of agents, I had some people say, ‘this reads almost like Middle Grade.’ I was like, ‘what are you talking about? The characters are 17, 18, 19.’ It took a while to realize that there were a lot of preconceived notions of what a certain age acts like, that doesn’t always track to the disabled experience.

So usually, the distinction between Middle Grade and YA is that Middle Grade is more about finding your place in the world with your family, and YA is about finding your place in the greater world, which might contradict your family. From that standpoint, my debut is very solidly YA, but I had some agents who weren’t sure how to place it in the market and suggested aging it down. I really stood my ground on that one, and just by gut instinct alone.
 

Did you envision writing more YA books after your debut?

Publishing likes to have similar books, in the sense that if a reader liked your first book, there are certain expectations they bring when picking up your next book. Admittedly, I wrote Give Me a Sign, thinking there’s my one off. I thought I would go back to writing historical fiction, but they wanted another YA that focused on similar themes.

At the time that I was doing developmental edits for Give Me a Sign, I ended up getting a pretty shitty diagnosis, and that was all I could think about. That was all I could write about. And I thought, here’s this very niche book that no one will probably read, but it fits the themes of the first book. Then On the Bright Side went on to win an ALA Award. I really kind of tripped into writing about disability, and it’s become somewhat therapeutic for me. There’s a lot there that’s helpful to explore through fiction.

As of right now, I have two more YA books coming out that I consider my collection of YA contemporary romances that all have a strong focus on disability. Stops Along the Way releases in May 2026, and a currently untitled fourth YA will be released in 2027. No matter what I write, I do think there will be a disabled character in my work throughout my career.
 

Your new book, Stops Along the Way, comes out later this year. What can you tell us about the story?

It’s a road trip book, but not in the typical sense of sightseeing. I always like to put just a little twist on things, where hopefully if you pick it up thinking it’s a straightforward road trip book, you’ll still enjoy it. It’s a book that focuses on luck and coincidence, and that ties into genetics at the same time, because the main character’s sister has genetic vision loss. The main character already has hearing aids, but there’s a one in four chance that she might inherit the same vision loss as her sister. So that’s just like in the background of her mind throughout the book, but the main plot of the story is about this board game that she and her rival play. It’s a fun little romance, as they’re like, returning home from the unexpected and how that plays out.

I’m very excited because some of the early readers have already taken a glance, and they’re like, ‘oh, once again, I love how Sortino explores disability with another cute romance.’ The book captures the feeling of falling in love for the first time, which I think is one of my favorite parts of dabbling in YA romance. It’s fresh. It’s a blank slate with all the possibilities. 
 

What are some of your favorite YA books?

The Percy Jackson books were my lifeline as a kid. I remember reading The Lightning Thief shortly after it came out, and every subsequent one when released. I went to a disability summer camp and in these books, there was such a connection there for me. Most of the YAs I read were historical fiction, which is something I really enjoy.
 

What advice do you have for aspiring authors?

There’s always the question of, ‘how do you find your voice?’ Like, speaking of voice as this mythical thing, how do you find it? It was actually a class I took in undergrad called Cold War and the Spy Novel that pointed me in the right direction. It was taught by this Russian professor, and he was complaining about our boring essays like, ‘You Americans, you always write what you think your reader wants to read and not what you want to say.’ Advice can come from the most unexpected places, but that really transformed me. I feel like we grow up writing in school in a way that everything we write has a thick layer of not-your-voice on top of it. You’re trying to write what you think you’re supposed to write before figuring out how to find your way back to your own voice. Voice seems like such a tricky concept, but voice is just how you share what’s in your brain with the world. It’s trying to make every piece of writing as authentically you as it can be, no matter what genre.

This interview is from the English Department's graduate programs blog, Ex-Libris.