Elizabeth Keenan

Elizabeth Keenan writes fiction shaped by music, friendship, and the ways young women define themselves inside hostile social spaces. Rebel Girls, published by Inkyard Press in 2019, is set at a conservative Catholic high school in Baton Rouge during the early 1990s. Athena Graves loves punk music and the riot grrrl movement, while her younger sister Helen is navigating the same school from a different social position. A damaging rumor about Helen pushes the sisters and their classmates toward a public campaign that borrows its energy from feminist music and zine culture. Keenan uses period songs, clothes, school rules, and pre-digital communication to make activism feel specific to its moment. Her background as a scholar and critic of popular music supports the novel's attention to who gets heard, who controls a story, and how a scene becomes a community. Rebel Girls is both a sister story and a historical teen novel about finding collective language for resistance.