Donna Barba Higuera

Donna Barba Higuera grew up in central California surrounded by agricultural and oil fields. As a child, rather than dealing with the regular dust devils, she preferred spending recess squirreled away in the janitor’s closet with a good book. Her favorite hobbies were calling dial-a-story over and over again and sneaking into a restricted cemetery to weave her own spooky tales using the crumbling headstones as inspiration. Donna’s young adult and middle grade books feature characters drawn into creepy, situations, melding history, folklore, and or her own life experience into reinvented storylines. She still dreams in Spanglish. Barba Higuera lives in Washington State with her family, three dogs and two frogs. Barba Higuera’s backyard is a haunted nineteenth-century logging camp. (The haunted part may or may not be true—she makes stuff up.) She is a Critique-Group-Coordinator for SCBWI-Western Washington and teaches “The Hero’s Journey for Young Authors” to future writers. Her most recent novel for young readers, The Last Cuentista, won the 2022 Newbery Medal.