About Maggie
Maggie Tokuda-Hall is an award-winning and best-selling author of books for children and young adults. She lives in Northern California with her husband, two children, and an objectively perfect dog.
She received her BA in Studio Art from Scripps College, and her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of San Francisco. While in grad school, Tokuda-Hall got a job as a children’s bookseller with the then independent bookstore chain, Books Inc. There she worked her way from being a children’s specialist in the Marina location in San Francisco, to running the children’s department for the company. She cut her teeth running and buying for school bookfairs, coordinating author visits into schools, managing the chain’s children’s events programming, and training children’s specialists for the entire company. Simultaneously, she also worked as a literary agent’s reader, an editorial intern in Chronicle Books Children’s Division, as a private kid and parent book club officiant, and as a creative writing tutor for children. Eventually, she was hired by Chronicle Books as a marketing manager, and then shortly thereafter as a partner manager for Apple’s iBooks.
She has published across a range of ages and formats with leading children’s publishers including Candlewick Press, Chronicle Books and Harper Collins crafting engrossing characters and settings in historical fiction picture books to genre defying young adult graphic novels.
Following the release of Love in The Library, illustrated by Yas Imamura (Candlewick, 2022), which was widely acclaimed and received several starred reviews, Tokuda-Hall found herself at the center of a censorship controversy when she publicly declined a licensing deal contingent on her removing the word “racism” from her Author’s Note. As a result, she was invited to give the keynote address at the 2023 Idaho Library Association’s annual conference. While there, she was shocked and sickened by the first-hand reports of the treatment librarians were receiving in that state because of the culture of book bans. Inspired by their bravery, and unwilling to allow librarians and educators to fight alone, Tokuda-Hall joined forces with David Levithan, Alan Gratz, Christina Soontornvat, Sayantani DasGupta, and Andrea Davis Pinkney to create Authors Against Book Bans. Tokuda-Hall served as President of AABB and set aside her own writing career for two years to get it off the ground. It is now a collective of over 5,000 creators, a nonprofit corporation, and a force in the national battle for the freedom to read, with chapters in all 50 states.
Tokuda-Hall is a native Californian through and through, having moved back and forth between the Bay Area and Los Angeles many times throughout her life. Now, she’s happily settled in Oakland, California, where she enjoys walking to her local bookstores, painting portraits of pigeons, and talking to her dog as if he were a human because she does low key suspect he’s a human cursed to live inside a dog suit.
While none of her books seemingly have much in common, Tokuda-Hall believes that children deserve the truth. And whether it’s a book about mermaids or werewolves, incarceration camps or monkeys, she strives to show kids something real about the world they live in, to ask them questions they may not have the answers to, and above all, to instill in them the joy of reading.
