N. Marasheski
Nikko Marasheski (they/them) is a storytelling Pennsylvania cryptid who usually hibernates in a blanket pile with at least one of their black cats, Phoebe or Lilly. Rumors have it they can be summoned with cats, cookie dough, or mentions of the supernatural. They also have a BFA in Dramatic Writing from the Savannah College of Art and Design with a minor in Animation, and double master's degrees in Publishing and Creative Writing from Rosemont College. When they aren’t being creative or babying their cats, they’re probably playing video games or binge-watching anime.
They have had their short story "3 O'Clock Bloom" published in Artemis 2017-2018 and received the Edward J. O'Donnell award for successfully pushing the boundaries of genre regarding their thesis, Black Hole Son.
WORK TO CHECK OUT
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Published in Artemis 2017-2018, a YA contemporary short story about a blossoming friendship between an awkward café server and the patient recurring customer. Read here!
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This thesis seeks to analyze the impacts of sociopolitical events on young adult publishing and analyze the trends of the traditionally published young adult titles regarding transness in the past roughly 20 years, using four different titles as case studies: Luna by Julie Anne Peters, Being Emily by Rachel Gold, Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas, and Hell Followed With Us by AJ White. What does the future look like for trans-YA stories? And what might benefit authors and agents to know about the publishing trends from the publisher’s side, and the desires of the readers’ side going forward?
To help determine where trans young adult literature may be heading in the future and evaluating the overall trends throughout the years, I will use Christine A. Jenkins and Michael Cart’s categories of development that they outlined for LBGT+ YA fiction, primarily lesbian/gay fiction and adapt it to what it would look like for trans stories. Those categories are homosexual visibility, gay assimilation, and queer consciousness/community, which I would be adapting to transgender visibility, trans assimilation, and trans consciousness/community. Transgender visibility would represent the stories where a major plot point is a character coming out or being outed as trans and the fear of backlash of being out. Trans assimilation would indicate that a character “just happens to be trans” like any other casual identifiable trait such as hair color or favorite tea. The highest level of trans consciousness and/or community is where a trans character or characters are shown in context of the community itself.