ABSTRACT
The act of making teaching, thinking, and learning visible can transform the profession and the lives of adolescent students and teaching colleagues by creating a more caring, just world in the practice and what we advance as professionals and artists. Isabel Quintero, author of the young adult novel Gabi, a Girl in Pieces, revealed in the conversation the influences for her writing life and ways to offer more voices and perspectives to adolescent worlds that resist conformity for compliance's sake. Young adult literature permits more possibilities to advance the creative and literary imagination with language arts. One of Quintero's fondest memories involves her mother, brother, and she walking to the public library and then carrying too many books home. Quintero is the 2015 winner of the William C. Morris Award from the Young Adult Library Services Association.
