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Short Author Bio

Megan E. Freeman attended an elementary school where poets visited her classroom every week to teach poetry, and she has been a writer ever since. Her New York Times bestselling novel in verse, ALONE, won the Colorado Book Award, the Illinois, Indiana, Japan, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Nebraska, and Vermont Children’s Book Awards, the High Plains Book Award, is an NCTE Notable Verse Novel, and is included on over two dozen "best of" and state reading lists. Megan is also a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and the author of the poetry chapbook Lessons on Sleeping Alone. Her latest book, AWAY, releases in February of 2025 from Simon & Schuster, and is a companion novel to ALONE. Megan used to live in northeast Los Angeles, central Ohio, northern Norway, and on Caribbean cruise ships. Now she divides her time between northern Colorado and the Texas Gulf Coast.

Long Author Bio

Megan E. Freeman attended an elementary school where poets visited her classroom every week to teach poetry, and she has been a writer ever since. Her New York Times bestselling novel in verse, ALONE, won the Colorado Book Award, the Illinois, Indiana, Japan, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Nebraska, and Vermont Children’s Book Awards, is an NCTE Notable Verse Novel, and is included on over two dozen "best of" and state reading lists. Megan is also a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet, and her poetry chapbook, Lessons on Sleeping Alone, was published by Liquid Light Press. Her latest novel, AWAY, releases in February of 2025 from Simon & Schuster, and is a companion novel to ALONE.

 

An award-winning teacher with decades of classroom experience, Megan taught multiple subjects across the arts and humanities to students K-16, and she is nationally recognized for presenting workshops and speaking to audiences across the country. She studied theater and dramatic literature for many years, earning degrees from Occidental College and the Ohio State University. 

 

Megan is a member of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators, Writing Heights Writers Association, Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers, Columbine Poets of Colorado, and Lighthouse Writers Workshop. She is an Impact on Education Award winner, a National Writing Project fellow, a Fund for Teachers fellow, and a member of the Colorado Poets Center. She used to live in northeast Los Angeles, central Ohio, northern Norway, and on Caribbean cruise ships. Now she divides her time between northern Colorado and the Texas Gulf Coast.

AWAY the long-awaited companion to ALONE

A group of children investigate the threat that prompted large-scale evacuations in this powerful and dramatic companion novel to the New York Times bestselling Alone told in multiple POVs.

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When an imminent threat alert causes a midnight evacuation in Colorado, four kids relocated to the same shelter become unlikely friends. After they stumble onto evidence casting doubt on the legitimacy of the evacuation, they begin an investigation that causes them to question everything and everyone around them.

 

Through a series of covert and courageous endeavors, the friends uncover the facts behind the “imminent threat” and must decide how—and if—they can expose the truth.

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Set in the same universe as Freeman's bestselling novel ALONE and told in a variety of poetry and prose forms, AWAY is a companion novel sure to please fans of adventure and mystery stories alike.

Permission is granted to download this image for publicity purposes. Art credit should be given to Pascal Campion.

ALONE a novel in verse

"The novel is gripping and the plot fast-paced...This is a tense, engrossing survival story on par with classics such as Hatchet."  (Booklist) 

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Perfect for fans of Hatchet and the I Survived series, this harrowing middle grade debut novel-in-verse from a Pushcart Prize–nominated poet tells the story of a young girl who wakes up one day to find herself utterly alone in her small Colorado town.

When twelve-year-old Maddie hatches a scheme for a secret sleepover with her two best friends, she ends up waking up to a nightmare. She’s alone—left behind in a town that has been mysteriously evacuated and abandoned.

With no one to rely on, no power, and no working phone lines or internet access, Maddie slowly learns to survive on her own. Her only companions are a Rottweiler named George and all the books she can read. After a rough start, Maddie learns to trust her own ingenuity and invents clever ways to survive in a place that has been deserted and forgotten.

As months pass, she escapes natural disasters, looters, and wild animals. But Maddie’s most formidable enemy is the crushing loneliness she faces every day. Can Maddie’s stubborn will to survive carry her through the most frightening experience of her life?

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A New York Times bestseller, winner of the Colorado Book Award, the Illinois, Japan, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Nebraska, and Vermont Children’s Book Awards, the High Plains Book Award, an NCTE Notable Verse Novel, and included on over two dozen "best of" and state reading lists, ALONE is a "Hatchet for a new age." (Kirkus)

Permission is granted to download this image for publicity purposes. Art credit should be given to Pascal Campion.

Lessons on Sleeping Alone a poetry chapbook

Lessons on Sleeping Alone is a beautiful, vibrant saga of a woman caught between the perfection of mythology and the loneliness of one-night business-meeting hotels...a fulfilling sequence of poems exploring the sensual awareness of the individual trying to find "self" amidst the promise of "kitsch and kinship."  It is filled with stark, sometimes shocking imagery that goes direct to the soul where, as Megan writes, "metaphor is fact and symbols are simply accessories we hang around our throats."  I recommend it.  

                    -- Jared Smith, Poetry Editor of Turtle Island Quarterly

 

There is blood in these poems, and flesh as well. From conception to death, from LA to the Arctic to Colorado, Freeman finds the angles to deal with subjects from Greek tragedy, an email inbox, the operating room, and, yes, sleeping alone. Freeman fearlessly probes that life that sustains life for: “Our chemical selves in all our juicy mess leave trails of truth shimmery as any snail’s.”

                   -- Robert King, Director of the Colorado Poets Center

 

In Megan E. Freeman’s passionate and intelligent collection of poems, Lessons on Sleeping Alone, the movement is that of coming into the open, of claiming space. Poem by poem, the poet’s voice emerges as “individual, recognizable, distinct,” words from poet Jane Hirshfield’s essay on originality in Nine Gates. The insights that inform this collection come to a hard-won place that is, in an early poem, identified as “You Are Here.” But here has become a more deeply owned and different place.

                  -- Veronica Patterson, Colorado Book Award Winner for Poetry

Permission is granted to download this image for publicity purposes. Art credit should be given to Chuck Ceraso.

Author Photos - credit Laura Carson Photography

Permission is granted to download these high resolution images for publicity purposes.

Photo credit must be given to Laura Carson Photography.

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