Lizzie Skurnick is a writer, critic and editor.^[1] In 2007, she started Jezebel's Fine Lines column, "the feature in which we give a wrinkled look at the books we loved as youth," which she wrote until 2009.^[1][2][3] Shelf Discovery, her book on young adult fiction of her youth, appeared from HarperCollins in 2009.^[4]

Her YA publishing imprint, Lizzie Skurnick Books, was founded in 2013.^[1][5] The press's classic YA reprints have been praised by The Boston Globe,^[6] The New York Times^[7] many other publications and organizations.^[8] The press's first original book, Isabel's War, published in 2014, received praise from The Wall Street Journal and other critical outlets and the Association of Jewish Libraries named it a Sydney Taylor Honor Book (second to the first prize winner).^[9][10][11]

Skurnick's "That Should Be a Word" column appeared weekly in The New York Times Magazine's One Page Magazine from 2011 to 2014.^[12] Her coinages have been praised and/or used by Bust Magazine,^[13] Salon,^[14] and ABC affiliates,^[15] among others. The Mets' Ron Darling suggested his own addition to the series.^[16] Skurnick's That Should Be a Word: A Language Lover’s Guide to Choregasms, Povertunity, Brattling, and 250 Other Much-Needed Terms for the Modern World, inspired by and expanding upon the column, was published by Workman in April 2015.^[16]

Skurnick first became known as the founder of a litblog.^[17]

Personal life

Skurnick identifies as black and Jewish.^[18][19] She has written that her parents' union was illegal in most of the United States when they married.^[20] She has also written about her reasons for giving birth to her son through a sperm donor.^[21] She was born in the Bronx and grew up in New Jersey.^[22] She lives in Jersey City.^[23][24] On May 20, 2023, she married Matthew Lenaghan, a resident of Ossining.

References