hell followed with us by andrew joseph white

“As soon as Ashley made it to Peachtree, she called and was like, ‘Hey, it hit acquisitions,’ and then it was, ‘Hey, we want an offer.’ ” White eventually connected with editor Ashley Hearn, who was just joining her current home at Peachtree Publishing. “I had one or two editors be like, ‘Just emotionally, I can’t do this, I’m sorry.’ And that’s totally fair! I completely get it.” Fun fact: it went on submission in March 2020, during lockdown. We did a few months of editing and put it out into the world. White began writing the book in 2018, during his senior year at college. Hell Followed with Us tells the story of a young trans teen named Benji, who stumbles into a community of queer survivors and joins their fight to stay alive in a world ravaged by a fundamentalist cult’s genetically engineered plague. And I was like, ‘Do you want it or not?’ And eventually he was like, ‘Oh, I thought you’d never ask.’ ”

“We lived in the same area at the time, and he was joking about bringing my book on. I ended up getting a lot of attention for that and meeting my agent at the time, Zabe Ellor, through it,” White recalls. “That was a formative space for a lot of friends of mine. Eventually White became one of the accounts spearheading the #LGBTWIP campaign for queer writers to share their works in progress. That passion blossomed into a goal to write a full-length book at an early age, finally leading to the release of his debut novel, Hell Followed with Us (Peachtree Teen), this month.Ĭollege and a master’s program in creative writing that played to White’s strengths in genre fiction gave him the opportunity to hone his craft, while turning to the writing community on Twitter offered an opportunity to carve out a niche in the publishing industry as he worked on the draft of his debut. “It was a running joke with my family that I would scribble on pieces of paper, and then hand it to my parents and demand that they read it back to me,” he says. Andrew Joseph White has been writing since before he could write.

Hell followed with us by andrew joseph white