Liara Tamani Books in Order

Liara Tamani grew up in Houston, Texas, and the city remains central to her work and life. Its neighborhoods, schools, family gatherings, and rodeo season show up in different forms across her fiction. She remembers spring in Houston as rodeo time, with the music, food, western clothes, and crowded excitement that come with it.

Her route to fiction was not a straight line. Tamani earned a BA from Duke University, attended Harvard Law School, and worked in several very different jobs before becoming an author, including marketing for the Houston Rockets and Comets and production assistance on the television series Girlfriends. She has also worked as a home accessories designer, floral designer, yoga teacher, and dance teacher.

Then writing became the work she wanted to keep doing.

Tamani earned an MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. While there, she began writing Calling My Name, building it in short pieces and revising with the help of monthly feedback and the program's deadlines. The novel grew from her wish to explore and heal parts of her own teenage experience, especially the confusion that can come when faith, desire, fear, and family expectations all pull in different directions.

Published in 2017, Calling My Name introduces Taja Brown, a Houston girl growing up in a loving, deeply religious Black family. As Taja moves from middle school toward college, she begins asking hard questions about faith, sexuality, and the different freedoms given to boys and girls. Tamani has been clear that Taja is not her, but the book was shaped by feelings and questions from Tamani's own youth. It became a 2018 PEN America Literary Award finalist and an SCBWI Golden Kite finalist.

She writes young people trying to hear themselves clearly.

Her second novel, All the Things We Never Knew, follows Carli and Rex, two Texas high school basketball players caught up in a powerful first love. Basketball supplies the motion, but the heart of the story is what each teen brings to the relationship: family pressure, grief, secrets, ambition, and the need to decide who they want to be. Tamani has said the book's first spark came from an intense early encounter with her own first love, later rebuilt into fiction.

In What She Missed, she turns to a different kind of upheaval. Sixteen-year-old painter Ebony Jones leaves Houston for Alula Lake, Texas, where memories of her late grandmother and new relationships make a hard summer even harder. This Ain't Our First Rodeo heads back to Houston through the world of Black cowboys, rodeo competition, horses, and family land, pairing a young bull rider with a restaurant heir who would rather be at her grandparents' ranch.

Across these books, Tamani returns to close family ties, complicated first love, the search for a self that feels honest, and the way a familiar place can change as a person grows. Her protagonists may be dealing with church rules, a basketball season, grief, or a rodeo arena, but they are usually facing the same basic problem: how to make choices when everyone around them has an opinion.

Tamani still lives in Houston, and her work has also appeared in Time and NPR. She continues to write for young adult readers, bringing Texas settings and emotionally direct questions about belonging, love, and family to the page.