Michelle Quach author page

Michelle Quach biography

Michelle Quach is a young adult author and freelance designer. She graduated from Harvard University, where she studied history and literature, and worked on student newspapers, including The Harvard Crimson. Her professional design work includes visual storytelling through design and data.

Quach’s debut novel, Not Here to Be Liked, was published in the United States by Katherine Tegen Books, an imprint of HarperCollins, in 2021. The contemporary YA novel follows Eliza Quan, an ambitious high school journalist who loses an election for editor in chief to the less experienced Len DiMartile. After Eliza writes an essay about the result, she unexpectedly becomes associated with a feminist movement at her school while developing complicated feelings for her rival.

Not Here to Be Liked was selected for the American Library Association’s 2022 Rise: A Feminist Book Project list and was a Junior Library Guild Selection. It was also named among the best books of 2021 by NPR, Kirkus Reviews, and Parents magazine, and was shortlisted in the Older Readers category of the 2022 Waterstones Children’s Book Prize.

Quach’s second YA novel, The Boy You Always Wanted, is told from the alternating perspectives of Francine and Ollie. Francine persuades her former crush and family friend to take part in a plan intended to fulfill her grandfather’s wish for a male heir, bringing questions about family expectations, tradition, and their changing relationship to the center of the story. The book was a Junior Library Guild Selection and was published in the United States by Katherine Tegen Books on August 1, 2023.