“In the first month I must have gotten hundreds of letters. newsmagazine, shortly after the book appeared. “If the volume of mail is any indication, there’s a hunger for this, a yearning,” she told The Advocate, the L.G.B.T.Q. The book was published in 2003, and the response from readers startled Ms. Aimed at older teenagers, it is the story of a has-it-all high school girl who finds herself falling for an openly lesbian transfer student.

Peters’s “Keeping You a Secret” arrived at her desk. Tingley had apparently lit a fire, and not long after, the manuscript of Ms. She responded very definitively that she would never write about that side of her life because she feared discrimination in her hometown,” in Colorado - even though she had been living openly as a lesbian for years.īut Ms. Tingley, now president and publisher of Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, said by email, “so I asked her if she had ever thought of trying to write one. “There were very few books for young adults featuring L.G.B.T.Q.+ characters at the time,” Ms. Peters published “Define ‘Normal,’” a more ambitious novel about the unlikely friendship between an honor student and the punk girl for whom she serves as a peer counselor, her editor, Megan Tingley, urged her to consider pushing the envelope. “How Do You Spell Geek?” (1997), for instance, centers on eighth graders and the National Spelling Bee.īut after Ms. Peters’s first novel for young readers, “The Stinky Sneaker Contest” (1992), is a humorous yarn aimed at 8- to 12-year-olds, and she stuck with relatively mild subjects for a few years. Her agent, Wendy Schmalz, did not give the cause but said the death came after a long illness. Julie Anne Peters, whose 2004 book, “Luna,” is thought to have been the first young-adult novel with a transgender character to be released by a mainstream publisher, and whose books have been among those singled out by conservative groups in Texas and other states for removal from library shelves, died on March 21 at her home in Wheat Ridge, Colo.

Luna by julie anne peters