Bill Konigsberg Books in Order

Bill Konigsberg was born in New York City in 1970. Before he wrote novels for teenagers, he imagined a few very different futures for himself, including professional baseball, radio, and performing with the Village People. Athletics did not quite work out, but the stories eventually did.

His early working life was varied. He held jobs as a driver recruiter for a truck-driving school, a sales consultant, and a temp at an elevator company. Those experiences gave him a useful feel for people trying to get through ordinary days while carrying private worries.

Sports gave him his first real writing career.

Konigsberg worked for ESPN and ESPN.com from 1999 to 2002, where he wrote a widely noticed column about the difficulties gay people faced in sports. The piece earned him a GLAAD Media Award. He later worked as a sports writer and editor for the Associated Press in New York, including coverage of the New York Mets.

While studying in the creative writing MFA program at Arizona State University, he wrote a novel called Audibles. After it sold, the title changed to Out of the Pocket. Published in 2008, the book follows a gifted high school quarterback, Bobby Framingham, as he wrestles with being gay in the intensely macho world of football. It won the Lambda Literary Award in 2009.

His next novel, Openly Straight, takes a different route through questions of identity. Rafe Goldberg has already come out, but transfers to a Massachusetts boarding school hoping to be known as more than “the gay kid.” The book introduced readers to Rafe and Ben Carver, and its companion novel, Honestly Ben, lets Ben face his own feelings, family pressures, and resistance to easy labels. Openly Straight won the Sid Fleischman Award for Humor.

Konigsberg's stand-alone novels keep returning to teens at moments when life gets messy. The Porcupine of Truth sends Carson and his new friend Aisha on a road trip from Montana in search of Carson's missing grandfather. The Music of What Happens brings together two very different Arizona boys through a struggling food truck. The Bridge follows two teens in crisis through several possible versions of one life-changing day. In Destination Unknown, two young men find connection and community in 1987 New York City during the AIDS epidemic.

Honesty, belonging, friendship, family, and the limits of labels run through his work.

His books make room for humor alongside fear, romance, grief, awkwardness, and hard conversations. In 2018, the Assembly on Literature for Adolescents established the Bill Konigsberg Award for Acts and Activism for Equity and Inclusion through Young Adult Literature in his name.

Konigsberg lives in Phoenix, Arizona, with his husband, Chuck, and their Australian Labradoodle, Buford. His background in sportswriting still shows up in his sharp attention to teams, competition, and the pressure young people feel to perform for others.