Kathryn Ormsbee Books in Order

If you want her graphic novels first: Growing Pangs → Turning Twelve
If you want smart YA about friendship and identity: Tash Hearts Tolstoy → Lucky Few
If you want middle grade contemporary stories: Candidly Cline → Vivian Lantz's Second Chances
If you want mystery or strange small-town tension: The Sullivan Sisters → The Great Unknowable End

Kathryn Ormsbee was born and raised in Kentucky, and she spent her childhood in Lexington. Her early world sounds a little like one of her books, with a backyard garden, a basement that became a spaceship, and plenty of room for imagination. That blend of ordinary life and make-believe still runs through her work.

She studied English at Samford University and graduated as valedictorian in 2011. After college she taught English for a year in Seville, Spain, then spent time in Austin at the Austin Film Society and later returned to Birmingham to help create a Shakespeare-themed web series. Before writing became her full-time job, she also taught piano lessons and worked in other arts and education spaces.

Publishing arrived early.

Ormsbee signed with a literary agent at 20, and not long after that she landed her first book deal. Her debut novel, The Water and the Wild, launched her fantasy work under the name K.E. Ormsbee. As Kathryn Ormsbee, she has built a body of contemporary middle grade and young adult fiction that moves easily between funny, painful, awkward, and hopeful.

A lot of readers first meet her through Tash Hearts Tolstoy, a sharp, funny novel about a teen filmmaker whose Anna Karenina web series suddenly goes viral. Others start with Lucky Few, which follows a homeschooled girl, her best friend, and a boy obsessed with death through a story about first love, illness, and grief. Ormsbee is very good at writing teenagers who are smart, weird, and not always sure how to explain themselves.

She writes big feelings without sanding off the awkward parts.

Her middle grade books pull the camera even closer. Candidly Cline follows a Kentucky songwriter chasing a workshop, a first crush, and the courage to say who she is. Vivian Lantz's Second Chances turns the worst first day of school into a time loop. And in the graphic novel Growing Pangs, created with Molly Brooks, Ormsbee draws on her own childhood to write about homeschooling, friendship breakups, anxiety, and OCD. Its companion, Turning Twelve, keeps following Katie as puberty, church pressure, and a first crush make growing up even messier.

Even when the setup gets stranger, her interests stay familiar. The Great Unknowable End mixes eerie weather and end-of-the-world tension with loss, art, and family strain. The Sullivan Sisters brings three sisters back together around grief, buried secrets, and a possible murder. Across age categories and genres, Ormsbee keeps returning to kids and teens who feel a little out of step and are trying to build a life that actually fits them.

Queer identity, friendship changes, sisters, music, theater, faith, mental health, and the pull of home show up again and again in her work. Kentucky is especially important, sometimes as a direct setting, sometimes just in the texture of the world. Ormsbee now lives in Austin, Texas, with her wife and their dog. Her books have been translated into several languages and have appeared on a range of best-of lists, but the real throughline is simpler than that: she writes for readers who want honesty, warmth, and room to be themselves.