Julian Winters

Running With Lions, the 2018 debut Julian Winters published with Duet Books, follows Sebastian Hughes, a goalkeeper at summer training camp whose estranged childhood friend Emir Shah turns up on the squad. It took an IBPA Benjamin Franklin gold award. Winters spent his adolescence in upstate New York and later settled in Decatur, Georgia, just outside Atlanta. As You Walk On By, published by Viking in 2023, gives Theo Wright, a Black queer seventeen-year-old at a magnet school, a future mapped out by his father: top grades, recruiters, a sports scholarship at Duke. A dare at a house party ends in a prom invitation refused in front of everyone, and Theo retreats upstairs to an empty bedroom, where classmates he barely knows arrive one at a time and an unlikely group forms. His later titles include the young adult novel Prince of the Palisades and the adult romance Last First Kiss, a USA Today bestseller.