Thanhhà Lai

Inside Out and Back Again is partially autobiographical. Born in Vietnam during the Vietnam War, Lai fled the country with her mother and eight older brothers in 1975, when she was 10 years old. In interviews, she’s described the escape from Vietnam as “too easy”—the hardest part of leaving Vietnam, she’s said, was feeling at home when her family settled in Alabama. After high school, Lai went on to earn a degree in journalism from University of Texas, Austin. She worked for several years for a California newspaper, covering the local Vietnamese community, and then earned a Master of Fine Arts from New York University. Lai remained in New York after this, and today, she teaches composition at Parsons The New School for Design. Inside Out and Back Again was her first book, and it took her about 15 years to write. When she began writing, the story was an adult prose novel. The novel only really began to take shape when Lai decided to write about a child and use poetry, which in her author’s note she explains helps convey how rhythmic and musical the Vietnamese language is. After it was published in 2011, Inside Out and Back Again won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature and was named a Newbery Honor Book. As of 2021, Lai has written two more books for young adults, Butterfly Yellow and Listen, Slowly.