Bill Konigsberg

Bill Konigsberg is the award-winning American author of Out of the Pocket and "Openly Straight." "Out of the Pocket" won the 2008 Lambda Literary Award in the LGBT Children's/Young Adult category. His second novel, Openly Straight was released in June 2013. It received a rave review in the New York Times, and starred reviews from Booklist and the Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books. The novel made YALSA's Best Fiction for Young Adults list for 2014; the American Library Association's Rainbow List; The Texas Library Association's Tayshas List; and was nominated for the Georgia Peach Award. The novel is being translated into German and Vietnamese.
Before becoming a fiction writer, Konigsberg was a sports writer. As a sports writer and editor for The Associated Press from 2005–08, he covered the New York Mets and his weekly fantasy baseball column appeared in newspapers across the country, from the New York Daily News to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. In May 2001, while working for ESPN.com, he came out on the front page of the website in an article entitled "Sports World Still a Struggle for Gays". That article won him a GLAAD Media Award the following year.