LIFTed UNITED welcomes Authors SOFIA LAPUENTE & JARROD SHUSTERMAN and EMILY WIBBERLEY & AUSTIN SIEGEMUND-BROKA, LIFTed UNITED Book Panel

  Sofía Lapuente is an author, screenwriter, and avid world traveler who immigrated from Spain to the United States to realize her dream of storytelling. Since then, she has received a master’s degree in fine arts at UCLA, worked as a producer and casting director on an Emmy nominated show, and received coauthor credits in Gleanings, the fourth installment of the bestselling Arc of a Scythe trilogy, with her partner, Jarrod. Their upcoming novel is a fun thriller called RETRO.

  Jarrod Shusterman is the New York Times bestselling coauthor of DRY, ROXY & RETRO. He writes screenplays and YA fiction with his partner Sofía. They have a passion for storytelling across many mediums, with love and multiculturalism as an ethos, and enjoy traveling the world and learning new languages. Together, the couple writes and produces film and television under their production company Dos Lobos Entertainment, and they both teach a course on Creative Writing at UCLA.

What starts off as a light-hearted competition to live without modern technology for a year turns into a fight for survival.

To save her struggling family, Luna enters a competition offering reward money to anyone who can successfully live without modern technology for a year. But when this social experiment turns sinister and her classmates start disappearing, her family’s livelihood might not be the only thing she’s in danger of losing.

  Emily Wibberley and Austin Siegemund-Broka met and fell in love in high school. Austin went on to graduate from Harvard, while Emily graduated from Princeton. Together, they are the authors of The Roughest Draft and Do I Know You?, as well as several novels about romance for teens. Now married, they live in Los Angeles, where they continue to take daily inspiration from their own love story.

The Inheritance Games meets Ocean's 11 in this thrilling YA adventure about a teenager determined to pull off the perfect heist in the midst of her father’s wedding. Seventeen-year-old Olivia Owens isn't thrilled that her dad's getting remarried...again. She's especially not thrilled that he cheated on her mom, kicked them out of their Rhode Island home, and cut Olivia out of her rightful inheritance. But this former heiress has a plan for revenge.

SOFIA LAPUENTE & JARROD SHUSTERMAN and EMILY WIBBERLEY & AUSTIN SIEGEMUND-BROKA in conversation with Karis McPherson, BUILDING BRIDGES PANEL 3