Meet Ali Terese

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Ali Terese. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Ali below.

Ali, thank you so much for taking the time to share your lessons learned with us and we’re sure your wisdom will help many. So, one question that comes up often and that we’re hoping you can shed some light on is keeping creativity alive over long stretches – how do you keep your creativity alive?

I write to work out emotional questions in my life, and there seem to be no end to them! For example, FREE PERIOD, my middle grade comedy out now from Scholastic, is about a couple of chaos monsters who fight to get maxipads in their school bathrooms. I experienced so much physical pain and shame around my period as a child that I didn’t know how I would talk about it in a positive way as a parent. So I did what writers do and spent sixty thousand words figuring it out. What I kept coming back to was friendship and laughter. Asking each other for pads, if what we were experiencing was normal, if you could see the pad through my pants! FREE PERIOD was the result. I hope that a couple of besties having laugh-out-loud fun while fighting for menstrual care will help break the ice on this issue for young readers.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?

I write comedies for tweens and teens. What I really love is addressing tough topics with humor to make them more accessible. So my debut novel FREE PERIOD is about period equity and the fact that many people across the country miss school and work when they don’t have the menstrual products they need. That can be a challenging issue to discuss because of the stigma society has created around periods. This book gets kids laughing with delightfully disgusting desserts like maxi-pad cupcakes, wildly weird crafts like crochet uteruses (they are critical to the plot!), and elite fart jokes. We can reclaim joy and fun through difficult experiences without being dismissed or treated as the target of a joke. I hope to do the same with my next book VOTES FOR GOATS, another middle grade comedy launching in 2025 with Simon & Schuster’s Aladdin imprint. It is a hijinks-fueled romp where a group of students needs to rescue their middle school’s mascot from a goatnapping so that they can truly free her from being trapped at their school in the first place.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

For writers early in their creative journey my advice is to (1) read books that bring you joy, (2) write what delights you because you are going to read it more times than you can possibly imagine, and (3) finish a project early on from the spark of an idea to as polished as you can make a final draft because that will give you the confidence to do it again and again!

Okay, so before we go, is there anyone you’d like to shoutout for the role they’ve played in helping you develop the essential skills or overcome challenges along the way?

My writing critique group! We exchange work and meet twice a month to share our reader reactions to pieces in progress. Most importantly we support each other through the highs and lows of the creative process. Sometimes making art can feel like a very solitary experience so I hope that everyone finds friends they connect with on this journey.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://aliterese.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alitereseauthor/
• Other: https://bookshop.org/p/books/free-period-ali-terese/19960360?ean=9781338835830

Image Credits

Ali Terese