Mélina Mangal

Mélina Mangal is a children’s author and school library media teacher whose work centers on connections between nature and culture. She has written picture books, biographies, short stories, and board books for young readers, including the acclaimed biography The Vast Wonder of the World: Biologist Ernest Everett Just, which received the Carter G. Woodson Award. Her nature-focused titles also include Jayden’s Impossible Garden, a picture book about finding urban nature that won the Strive/Free Spirit African American Voices in Children’s Literature contest and was named one of the Best Children’s Books of the Year by the Bank Street Center for Children’s Literature, as well as its sequel Jayden’s Secret Ingredient and the Outside Our Window board book series.

Mangal’s work has appeared with publishers such as Milkweed Editions, Coffee House Press, W.W. Norton, and Carolina Wren Press, and she has authored multiple biographies for youth, including works on notable African American writers such as Virginia Hamilton, Mildred D. Taylor, and Rita Williams-Garcia. Her recent young adult short fiction is featured in Boundless: Twenty Voices Celebrating Multicultural and Multiracial Identities. Based in Minnesota, she works and writes there