Susan Kuklin

About Susan Kuklin

Susan Kuklin was born in 1941 and grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She studied theater at New York University and the Herbert Berghof School before returning to NYU for graduate work, where she pivoted to photography. That combination—the actor's instinct for listening, the photographer's eye for the telling moment—became the foundation of her decades-long career as a documentarian of young lives.

Kuklin does not write about young people from the outside; she spends time with them, lets them speak, and photographs them in their own environments. Her books are collaborative acts of witnessing. The result is a body of work that spans ballet and basketball, child labor and capital punishment, immigration and gender identity—united by a consistent commitment to letting her subjects be seen and heard on their own terms.

Beyond Magenta

Kuklin spent several years getting to know six transgender and gender-nonconforming teenagers before publishing Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out in 2014 with Candlewick Press. The book combines her original photography with first-person oral histories drawn from extensive interviews—each subject speaking about their own childhood, their experience of gender, and their path to self-understanding. It was designed neither to argue a political position nor to serve as a primer for debate, but simply to let young people who are rarely portrayed in literature speak for themselves.

The book received immediate critical recognition. It was named a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2014, won the Flora Stieglitz Straus Award in 2015, and was nominated for the Stonewall Book Award for Children's and Young Adult Literature. The American Library Association ranked it the 27th most banned and challenged book in the United States between 2010 and 2019, and it was among the ten most challenged books in both 2015 and 2019. Critics who sought its removal objected to its political and religious viewpoints, its coverage of sexual topics, and their belief that it was not age-appropriate—while librarians who defended it noted that the book's stated audience, LGBTQ+ teenagers, is precisely the group most at risk of isolation and harm from silence.

A Career Documenting Hidden Lives

Kuklin's other books are equally rooted in reporting from the margins. No Choirboy: Murder, Violence, and Teenagers on Death Row (2008) brought her into prisons to interview juvenile offenders on death row, giving voice to lives that the justice system had already consigned to oblivion. The book received an ALA Best Books for Young Adults designation and was an ALA Quick Pick for Reluctant Readers. We Are Here to Stay: Voices of Undocumented Young Adults (2019) and In Search of Safety: Voices of Refugees (2020) extended her method to the experiences of immigrants and displaced people navigating a country that is often hostile to their presence.

Across more than thirty books, Kuklin has made a career of the documentary interview as a literary form—insisting that nonfiction for young people can be just as challenging, humane, and artistically serious as any novel, and that truth-telling about difficult realities is not an obstacle to young readers but a form of respect for them.