K. A. Holt is an American author from Austin, Texas. She is best known for her young adult fiction and middle grade novels-in-verse, and her work has been featured on numerous library and school reading lists around the country. Holt has also expanded her authorial platform by visiting schools and giving literary talks across the nation.

Holt’s publications include Mike Stellar: Nerves of Steel (2009), Brains for Lunch: A Zombie Novel in Haiku (2010), Rhyme Schemer (2014), House Arrest (2014), Gnome-a-geddon (2017), Knockout (2018), From You to Me (2018), Redwood and Ponytail (2019), Den of Vipers (2020), Ben Bee and the Teacher Griefer: The Kids Under the Stairs (2020), Ben Y and the Ghost in the Machine: The Kids Under the Stairs (2021), This Is Not A Drill (2022), Jordan J and the Truth About Jordan J: The Kids Under the Stairs (2022), and others. The next installment in her Kids Under the Stairs series—Javier and the Cone of Uncertainty: The Kids Under the Stairs—is forthcoming in May 2026.

While some of Holt’s novels are written in verse (or in a series of collected, narrative poems) and others are written in more traditional prose, all of Holt’s novels feature “main characters who struggle, celebrate, wonder and grow in ways both new and familiar” (“About.” K. A. Holt). Holt prioritizes representation—particularly queer representation—across her work, creating space for nontypical teen and adolescent experiences. A queer-identifying person herself, Holt strives to tell stories for kids of all demographics and identifications. In the acknowledgments section of the source text, Holt explains, “[I]n middle school and high school, I was hungry for books that spoke to me” even before she understood “how to define a ‘girl like me’” (420). She read voraciously but always felt like something was missing; she later realized that she never saw queer identities represented in literature. Across her canon, Holt prioritizes such underrepresented stories. She claims that while Redwood and Ponytail “is for every reader who’s trying to figure out the world,” it is also “for [her] when [she] was a kid” (420). All of her titles are written in an accessible, candid style that seeks to make literature and poetry appealing and enjoyable to a wide range of young readers.

Holt has won numerous awards for her novels. This recognition includes but is not limited to the 2020 Bank Street Best Books of the Year and the 2020 NCTE Notable Poetry Books Selection for Redwood and Ponytail; the 2018 New York Public Library Best Books for Kids and the 2018 Nerdy Book Club’s Nerdie awards for Knockout; the 2015 NCTE Notable Children’s Book in the Language Arts and the 2015 Bank Street Best Books of the Year Selection for Rhyme Schemer; the 2017 Mississippi Magnolia Award Winner and the 2015 Writer’s League of Texas Middle Grade and YA Finalist for House Arrest; and the 2011 Texas Library Association’s Annotated Lone Star Reading List for Brains for Lunch.

Holt’s novels are in conversation with other contemporary YA and MG novels like Ellen Hopkins’s Crank, David Levithan’s The Realm of Possibility, Elizabeth Acevedo’s The Poet X, Amber McBride’s Me (Moth), and Jason Reynolds’s Twenty-Four Seconds from Now…. Like Holt’s titles, these novels also explore themes of social anxiety, the search for identity, and finding love and acceptance in unlikely places.