Kacen Callender

Kacen Callender is originally from Saint Thomas in the US Virgin Islands. They are the author of the young adult novel This Is Kind of an Epic Love Story and the middle grade novel Hurricane Child. Felix Love, the title character in Kacen Callender’s Felix Ever After (Balzer + Bray) has never been in love—and, yes, he’s painfully aware of the irony. He desperately wants to know what it’s like and why it seems so easy for everyone but him to find someone. What’s worse is that, even though he is proud of his identity, Felix also secretly fears that he’s one marginalization too many—Black, queer, and transgender—to ever get his own happily-ever-after. When an anonymous student begins sending him transphobic messages—after publicly posting Felix’s deadname alongside images of him before he transitioned—Felix comes up with a revenge plan. But he didn’t expect it would land him in a quasi–love triangle and a journey of questioning and self-discovery that would help redefine his most important relationship: how he feels about himself. In a starred review Publishers Weekly praised it as a “top-notch depiction of a messy, complicated, romantic young artist navigating the bumpy road to self-love and self-determination …”