Lauren Gibaldi is a public librarian who’s been, among other things, a magazine editor, high school English teacher, bookseller, and circus aerialist. She is the author of the contemporary YA novel The Night We Said Yes and the novella, Matt’s Story. In The Night We Said Yes (HarperTeen), when Maude decides to search for information about her birth mother, she finds out more than she expected as she starts to realize that her mother’s past doesn’t have to define her own future.