Sara Latta author page

Sara Latta biography

Sara Latta is an American children’s and young adult nonfiction author whose books cover science, medicine, engineering and history. She studied microbiology and English at the University of Kansas, earned a master’s degree in immunology from the University of Chicago and completed an MFA in Creative Writing at Lesley University in 2006. Her professional background includes science writing and editing for the University of Chicago Hospitals and the American Oil Chemists’ Society.

Her early children’s books include The Good, the Bad, the Slimy: The Secret Life of Microbes (Enslow Publishers, 2006) and Stella Brite and the Dark Matter Mystery (Charlesbridge, 2006), illustrated by Meredith Johnson. She subsequently wrote Scared Stiff: Everything You Need to Know About 50 Famous Phobias, published by Zest Books, which was selected for the Young Adult Library Services Association’s 2015 Quick Picks for Reluctant Young Adult Readers list.

Latta’s science titles include Smash! Exploring the Mysteries of the Universe with the Large Hadron Collider (Graphic Universe, 2017), Black Holes: The Weird Science of the Most Mysterious Objects in the Universe (Twenty-First Century Books, 2018) and Body 2.0: The Engineering Revolution in Medicine (Twenty-First Century Books, 2019). The latter examines developments in biomedical engineering, including regenerative medicine, neuroscience and genetic engineering.

In 2022, Zest Books published her young adult biography I Could Not Do Otherwise: The Remarkable Life of Dr. Mary Edwards Walker. The book recounts the life of the pioneering American physician, women’s rights campaigner and Civil War surgeon who became the first and only woman to receive the United States Medal of Honor. It was named a School Library Journal Best Book of 2022 and received an honourable mention for the 2023 Grateful American Book Prize.