Tristina Wright Books in Order

If you want the main place to start: 27 Hours
If you like queer YA with monsters and romance: The Siren Son → 27 Hours
If you want a quick sample before the novel: Jar of Broken Wishes → 27 Hours

Tristina Wright is an American writer of young adult science fiction and fantasy. Her published work is compact, but it gives a clear sense of what she likes to do: put queer teens in dangerous, imaginative worlds, then ask how love, fear, and loyalty hold up when everything gets messy.

She has said she fell hard for science fiction and fantasy when she was young, and she was also the kid who got caught writing in class instead of paying attention. She started writing around age twelve. Later, she earned a degree in creative writing, though she has been quick to say a degree is not what makes someone a writer.

The road to publication was not smooth. Wright has talked about stepping away from writing for about eight years after some professors dismissed her work and her chances of making it as an author. She eventually came back to it while pregnant with her first child, wanting to return to the dream she had set aside and show her kids that other people's limits do not have to become your own.

That return stuck.

Before her novel debut, Wright published short fiction. The Siren Son, which appeared in Lightspeed, is a fantasy about boys on opposite sides of a divided world, and Jar of Broken Wishes in the anthology Welcome Home blends foster care, longing, and a touch of magic. Even in shorter form, the pattern is easy to spot: intimate character stories inside much bigger systems, myths, and conflicts.

Her best-known book is 27 Hours, published in 2017. Set on the moon Sahara, it follows four teens trying to stop a war between human colonies and the native chimeras during one long, dangerous night. Readers who click with it usually point to the fast pace, the queer ensemble cast, and the way romance, survival, grief, and politics all collide at once.

Representation matters here.

Wright has written directly about intersectionality and about how fiction too often treats white, straight, cis, able-bodied life as the default. Her own stories push the other way. She builds characters whose race, disability, sexuality, family history, trauma, and desire all exist at once, because that is how real people live. She has also said one reason she loves speculative fiction is that it lets her imagine worlds where being gay, bi, or trans is not treated as a problem that needs explaining.

She has also written openly about anxiety, and in 2015 she described being diagnosed with degenerative disc disease, a condition that changed what work and daily life could look like. Around the time of her debut, her author bios painted a specific picture: coffee nearby, curls doing their thing, stories half-built in her head, and family life always in the room. There is humor in the way she presents herself, too, including recurring jokes about blue hair and maybe, possibly, being a mermaid. Even with a small bibliography, her work feels specific and recognizable: queer young people, monsters, mixed loyalties, and hope stubborn enough to survive a very long night.