SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE -- LaCour, a youthful-looking 35, grew up in Moraga, graduated from Campolindo High School in 2000, got her bachelor’s in English at San Francisco State in 2004 and her master’s in creative writing at Mills College in 2006. She taught English at Berkeley’s Maybeck High School from 2007 to 2013, and now teaches in the master’s program in creative writing at Hamline University in Minnesota, to which she travels periodically.
LaCour is among the top tier of young-adult authors writing contemporary realistic fiction. She’s also known as an LGBTQ author, but she says she doesn’t let her queer characters’ sexuality “define what the book has to be about.” Her editor, Julie Strauss-Gabel, the publisher of Dutton Books whose writers include John Green, Gayle Forman and Stephanie Perkins, has worked with LaCour since receiving the manuscript for her first novel, the teen suicide-themed Hold Still, in 2007.