Kate and Nate

In the summer of 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, Kate and Nate started to write books together on Kate’s front lawn.

Kate loves telling stories. She talks a lot. For her, writing is a conversation with people all over the world. She loves movement and messiness and coming up with plots.

Nate loves words. Their origins, their meanings, their sounds. The way they dance together in sentences. He loves rearrangement and rhythm.

Kate hates how words trip her up with similarities and spellings. Nate hates a blank page. Together, they wrote fiction about the past and non-fiction about the present. They wrote for kids. They wrote for grown-ups. They got a fantastic agent who made their writing even better. Thank you, Sarah!

Writing Confessions of a Mango

Seeing her son struggling in school one day, Kate remembered what it felt like to fail. To not be good enough even when you try. She’d tried to grow past that feeling without looking it in the eye. But when her son had to stare it down, Kate finally quit looking away.

Turns out shame doesn’t live well in sunlight. When you let it out into the world, rather than keeping it closed up inside, it evaporates.

Kate drew up a sloppy copy of Confessions of a Mango (sloppy copies are really what Kate loves best) and Nate made it neat. Their agent Sarah made it sing and then sent it out to editors. Two of them, Erika Turner and Roddyna Saint-Paul at Little, Brown Books For Young readers, made it even better. They gave it a cover and pages and now you get to read it.

We hope it means as much to some of you as it means to us.