Raina Telgemeier

About Raina Telgemeier

Raina Telgemeier was born on May 26, 1977, in San Francisco, California. She studied cartooning at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, graduating in 2000. After years of creating minicomics and web comics, she broke through with the graphic memoir Smile (2010), a fictionalized account of a dental accident she suffered in middle school and its social and emotional aftermath. It became a #1 New York Times bestseller and remained on the list for years.

What followed was one of the most remarkable runs in contemporary American comics publishing. Drama (2012), Sisters (2014), Ghosts (2016), and Guts (2019) — each a New York Times bestseller. Telgemeier's books have sold over 30 million copies combined, and she has been credited with helping to establish the graphic novel as a central category in middle-grade publishing rather than a niche format.

Her Work and Its Reach

Telgemeier's appeal lies in her ability to render the internal lives of children and young teenagers with clarity and emotional precision. Her characters — almost always in some form of social distress — are never mocked for what they feel. Her art is expressive and warmly colored, her page compositions clear. She makes the emotional texture of middle school legible to readers who are living it.

Drama, in particular, occupies an important cultural position. The story of a girl who falls in love with theater and the set of a school musical, it also contains what was, at the time of publication, a rare thing in graphic novels for middle readers: gay characters who are not defined by their coming-out and who are presented as part of normal school social life. The book won a Stonewall Honor and multiple Eisner nominations.

Challenges and Book Bans

Telgemeier is one of the most challenged graphic novelists in American school libraries. Drama has been removed from school library shelves in dozens of districts across multiple states. The challenges are almost uniformly about its LGBTQ+ content — specifically the portrayal of two gay teenage characters as part of the normal social fabric of a school.

Telgemeier has spoken publicly about these challenges, noting the particular irony of banning a book about theater kids that contains no sexual content of any kind. She has emphasized that she wrote the book for the kids who need to see themselves in stories — and that restricting those kids' access to that story serves no legitimate educational purpose.

The American Library Association has placed Drama on its list of most frequently challenged books in multiple years. Telgemeier remains one of the most-read children's authors in the country.