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Author, Editor, New Yorker, proud Latina, and lover of personality quizzes

Remember Maya & Miguel? Hunters of Chaos? And now Life in the Doghouse! Proud to call this Queens author a friend. Check out her books for holiday gifts! Here she is inspiring local kids at @QPLNYC https://crystalvelasquez.com/about-crystal-velasquez/ @crystalvelasquezauthor

$On this day (St. Patrick’s Day – always easy to remember!) in 2003, I was 21 years old and starting a new job, my first after graduating from uni, and wondering how long I would last before being “rumbled” and told to go home. It’s been a full twenty years, and I still haven’t been rumbled. Had a crazy idea as I wrapped up the first work day of my 21st year at Working Partners*: that I would lay out all (or, as many as I could find) of the books to which I’d contributed as a creative editor and/or writer, but even the long table in the company’s “big meeting room” would not be big enough! So, instead, I scrounged up one or two key titles from as many of the series in which I’ve been involved, in varying capacities, as I could find (the unrepresented are hiding behind others on the shelves, or are so rare now not even WP has copies! 😲). I may have put too much effort into the arrangement, but seeing just a fraction of the fruits of my colleagues’ creative and editorial labours definitely made it feel worthwhile. Because it is just a *fraction* of the team’s output, and thinking of it as a fraction reminds me (not that I need reminding!) of how lucky I am to get to be part of this team. It’s a lot of books, that took a lot of work, often to very tight schedules, and there truly is only a very small number of creative editors who could produce this many stories, across so many age-ranges and genres, so quickly – and a significant portion of that very small number has worked for Working Partners at one time or another. Even after 20 years, I am still constantly impressed and inspired by the people I get to work with, and still energised (mostly… I am 41 now!) by the stories we get to tell. [*Trying not to think about how, if I survive another 10 years without being rumbled, I’ll be… 51!]$

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Crystal Velasquez

@crystalvelasquezauthor