AS King

Biography

King was born and grew up outside of Reading, Pennsylvania. She recalls that due to a particular seventh grade teacher, she gave up on achieving good grades and instead played basketball and worked.

She then moved to Ireland landing in Dublin first for two years, then to Tipperary, Ireland where she and her husband renovated a farm and she worked with adult literacy students. While in Dublin, before she could obtain a work permit, she read a book a day, often classics she thought she would have read if she studied writing, including "a lot of surrealist fiction." She began writing novels while in Dublin. She returned to Pennsylvania in 2004.

Writing

King wrote seven novels, as well as poetry and short stories, before she published her first novel, and collected more than 400 rejection letters. Her first published work was actually poetry to some university journals in the United States. She was unaware of the young adult market and wrote about adult characters, but the stories often started earlier in the characters' lives and she states, "What I was always doing was trying to help teenagers better understand the adults in their lives, and vice versa." King does not plan her novels; she often starts with a character and discovers their personality and their stories as she writes, and then edits heavily. She also often includes magical realism and unconventional structures.

Even with an agent, King faced difficulty publishing because it was hard to categorize her work; it was not until an editor asked for "something weird" that she received a deal and learned about the young adult market. The novel, The Dust of 100 Dogs, was published by the small young adult press Flux in 2009. Since there was already a writer named Amy King, she chose to write with the initials "A.S."; the S stands for her maiden name, Sarig. She found this pen name appropriate as she writes gender-neutral novels and it spelled "asking".

Her second novel, Please Ignore Vera Dietz, was bid on by seven different publishing houses. King chose Knopf because of editor Michelle Frey's "vision" for the novel; other publishing houses wanted to remove the adults in the book. Please Ignore Vera Dietz was a 2011 Michael L. Printz Award Honor Book and an Edgar Allan Poe Award nominee for "Best Young Adult". Her third young-adult novel, Everybody Sees the Ants, was named one of the Top Ten Books for Young Adults in 2012 and was an Andre Norton Award finalist. Her fourth young-adult novel, Ask the Passengers (2012), won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. It was also a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and a Library Journal Best YA Books for Adults selection. This was followed by Reality Boy in 2013, which was inspired by wondering if some children on reality television that were presented as entertainment were subject to abuse. Her 2014 novel, Glory O'Brien's History of the Future, follows a character who is actually the daughter of the protagonist in an unpublished novel King wrote in 2004, called Why People Take Pictures.

Her short fiction for adults has been published in Washington Square, Contrary, Quality Women's Fiction, Eclectica Magazine, Word Riot, Amarillo Bay, Literary Mama, Underground Voices, The Huffington Post, Lit103.3 and FRiGG. A collection of twelve of her short stories, titled Monica Never Shuts Up, was published in 2012 in ebook format and later in print from Createspace.

Little, Brown has announced that King's seventh novel, I Crawl Through It, is forthcoming in September 2015. This will be King's first surrealist novel, a genre she feels she has been moving toward over her writing career. It has also been announced that she will have two novels coming out in 2016 and 2017 respectively, this time with Dutton Children's Books. She will be working with Andrew Karre, who bought her first published book. Expected to be published in 2017 will also be King's first middle grade novel, Finding Marvin Gardens. It will be published by Arthur A. Levine Books (an imprint of Scholastic) and will be written under the name of Amy Sarig King.

Awards and recognition

King won the 2011 Michael L. Printz Award Honor for Please Ignore Vera Dietz. Ask the Passengers won the annual Los Angeles Times Book Prize for young-adult literature in 2012. In 2015, she was named the "Outstanding Pennsylvania Author" for that year by the Pennsylvania School Librarians Associations; all of her novels have taken place in the state.

Several of her works have been contenders for book awards or have been named to annual booklists.

Works