Daniel José Older

Daniel José Older spent ten years on ambulances as a paramedic in New York before he published fiction, and the city keeps returning in the books. Shadowshaper Legacy closes the Shadowshaper Cypher, the Brooklyn young adult sequence in which Sierra Santiago learns that murals and music can hold spirits; Time magazine listed the opening volume among the best fantasy novels ever written. Freedom Fire is the second Dactyl Hill Squad book, a middle grade series from Scholastic in which dinosaurs pull the carts and Civil War cavalry ride raptors; by this volume the squad has left the 1863 New York of the first book for Tennessee. Ballad & Dagger began the Outlaw Saints books for Rick Riordan Presents in 2022, drawing on Older's Cuban and Jewish family background through Mateo Matisse, whose island home of San Madrigal sank into the sea sixteen years earlier. Race to Crashpoint Tower belongs to Star Wars: The High Republic, the publishing project for which he works as lead story architect. He has won the International Latino Book Award.