Lesa Cline-Ransome is the author of nearly 30 books for young readers including Satchel Paige, Words Set Me Free, and Jane Addams Honor Book and Christopher Award winner Before She was Harriet. Her middle grade novel, Finding Langston received the Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction and was the first in a series followed by Leaving Lymon and Being Clem, both named Kirkus Best Books. Lesa’s debut novel, For Lamb, a historical YA novel based on female victims of lynching mobs in Jim Crow Mississippi, released in 2023.
At MacDowell, Lesa worked on One Big Sky, a historical novel in verse for young readers about 11-year-old Lettie, her mother Sylvia, and 18-year Philomena as they migrate west on Oregon trail in 1879.
