Newsmaker: Brian Selznick

Until recently, Caldecott Medal–winning author-illustrator Brian Selznick had never written for young adults, nor written a full-fledged love story. That changed with Run Away with Me (Scholastic, 2025), a YA novel about a transformative summer romance between two teenage boys in 1980s Rome that is interwoven with love stories spanning centuries in the Eternal City.

Selznick, known for the children’s books The Invention of Hugo Cabret and Wonderstruck, spoke with the American Library Association’s How I Library podcast about finding revelatory love, building on cultural history, and why books scare those in power.

Where did Run Away with Me’s setting and story come from?

My husband won a fellowship that brought us to Rome at the height of the pandemic, and we had the city to ourselves—the Trevi Fountain, the Pantheon, the Colosseum. I wanted to reflect that feeling of walking around an empty city and living among history, where beauty and ruin coexist. I began to imagine two teenage boys meeting there and falling in love. I didn’t know who they were until about a year and a half later, when I started writing.

At its heart, the book is about curiosity and revelation, about uncovering who you are and allowing someone else to see you. I didn’t experience that kind of love until I was 30.

Why was it important for you to tell this story, particularly for a young adult audience?

I grew up in the Seventies and Eighties, very closeted and knowing nothing about queer history. When I started to come out, that discovery of belonging to a larger history was deeply moving for me. It gave me a sense of stability, that I wasn’t alone.

I wanted to create a story where that history is baked into the fabric of the book itself. The interwoven love stories, spanning the 1600s to the 1940s, show that queer love has always found a way to exist, even when it wasn’t allowed a name. You can’t erase that. You can’t make love disappear.

But the homophobia and danger are very real, which is why violence shows up so often in stories about young queer people coming out. When I was writing this, I knew two things about the plot: I didn’t want to write a coming-out scene and I didn’t want any violence. I wanted the story to exist in a real world that was also a safe world.

Speaking of the real world: What do you make of the current wave of book bans, which have targeted the voices of marginalized communities?

When you attack books, you’re attacking the people those stories represent. So if you’re trying to control people through fear and ignorance, then yes, books are the enemy. That’s why authoritarian regimes burn them.

Walt Whitman wrote about books as living things—about the sensual, physical connection between the reader’s body and the book in his pocket. If books are living bodies that can be wounded and burned, then caring for them is an act of resistance.

What gives you hope in this environment?

What always amazes me is how powerful books still are and how they continue to terrify people in power. That’s because books do what nothing else can: They teach empathy, they open worlds, they make us human.

And that’s why libraries have always been essential to me. I used to love seeing the names written on the checkout cards in old library books, knowing who had read them before me, and adding my own name to that list. That sense of connection through shared reading is powerful. Libraries are where stories live, and where we keep finding each other.