Meg Medina

Meg Medina was born and raised in New York City, the daughter of Cuban immigrant parents, and grew up between two cultures — the vibrant Latino community of Queens and the wider American world into which she was simultaneously being integrated. This bicultural experience, with its richness of language, food, music, and competing expectations, became the central subject of her fiction for young readers. Medina studied at St. John’s University and later earned a master’s degree in education, and she has worked as an educator and literacy advocate alongside her career as a writer, maintaining a deep connection to the communities and schools that her books serve.

Medina’s debut picture book, Tía Isa Wants a Car, won the Pura Belpré Illustrator Award, introducing her as a writer with a gift for celebrating the texture and beauty of Latino family life. Her middle grade and young adult novels have continued to earn recognition for their authentic portrayal of growing up Latina in the United States. Her novel Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass (2013), which addresses bullying and the social hierarchies of high school with unflinching honesty, won the Pura Belpré Award and established her as a major voice in young adult fiction about the Latino experience in America.

Medina’s most celebrated work is Merci Suárez Changes Gears (2018), a middle grade novel about a scholarship student at a private school who must navigate the social pressures of her new environment while her grandfather begins to show signs of Alzheimer’s disease at home. The novel won the Newbery Medal — making Medina the first Latina author to win the award — and was praised for its emotionally nuanced portrayal of family, identity, and the experience of occupying multiple social worlds simultaneously. The honor was recognized as a significant moment for Latino representation in American children’s literature.

Medina’s writing is characterized by its authentic voice, its warm and complex portraiture of Latino family life, and its ability to address serious social and personal challenges with the right balance of honesty and hope. She writes with deep respect for her young characters’ interior lives and for the communities that shaped them. Meg Medina lives in Richmond, Virginia, and continues to write and advocate for Latino readers and for the importance of diverse stories in children’s literature.