Michael Leali is a veteran educator, an award-winning middle grade novelist, part-time bookseller, and an advocate for the LGBTQ+ community. He currently teaches sixth grade humanities at East Bay School in Berkeley, Calif. Leali has published three middle school novels: The Civil War of Amos Abernathy, Matteo, and The Truth About Triangles in the last six years, all with queer main characters. And he’s just getting started. PW spoke with Leali about how his teaching, writing, and life intersect and impact one another, how meeting a children’s author as a kid changed his life, and why he feels called to represent LGBTQ+ identities and stories amid growing book bans and discrimination.
What is the best part of teaching for you? What is the most challenging?
It’s all about relationships. While teaching content is important, you can’t get to the content until you have developed trust, care, and kindness with your students. I don’t know if my students will remember the differences between certain literary theories or devices that I teach them. But I do know that they’ll remember how they were treated. I want every kid to know that they belong, they matter, and they’re seen. This means looking my students in the eyes, having very intentional conversations with them, and walking around the room making sure that I check in with every one of them about their work and how they’re doing each day. It’s demanding, exhausting—and the best part. It’s also the most challenging.
As an educator, it’s not just about the transmission of knowledge, it's about looking at the overall human being. We are providing feedback on work, their behaviors, and their emotional needs. Because I'm a highly sensitive, empathetic person, this can affect my emotional well-being. But I’ve learned to safeguard my own emotions. I do this by reminding myself that the emotions of the children I’m serving are not my emotions. I can feel for them, but I don't have to take their emotions on as my own. I'm still figuring this out.
How did you figure out you wanted to teach and write for kids?
I was homeschooled as a kid, and I loved to write. My mom’s curriculum focus—from my elementary school years until middle school—was on stories, storytelling, classic literature, and included lots of picture books. Books for young people have always been an intrinsic part of my life and so was writing. I wrote my very first story in first grade. I still have it.
It was an author visit with Debbie Dadey in elementary school before I was homeschooled that would change everything for me. When Dadey, the author of the Bailey School Kids series, spoke about her books, it was like fireworks lit up my brain. Then, when she mentioned one of her titles: Vampires Don’t Wear Polka Dots, I ran home and wrote a book called Frogs Don’t Do Art. And I haven’t stopped creating kids’ stories since.
When did you pursue publishing stories for children?
While getting my MFA in children’s writing at Vermont College of Fine Arts, I experimented with writing young adult, middle grade, graphic novels, novels in verse, and picture books. In my final semester, I started writing a middle grade novel entitled Matteo. I wrote it while I studied with the author A.S. King. It became my second published novel. While it is different from the book that is published today, that first draft holds a special place in my heart.
Can you tell us more about Matteo and your two other middle novels, The Civil War of Amos Abernathy and The Truth About Triangles?
Matteo is about a boy who feels like no matter how hard he tries, he’s never boy enough. When he makes the Blue Whales baseball team that his dad starred on as a kid, he feels like he’s done it. But soon things go sideways. He starts growing leaves, twigs, and bark, and needs to figure out why he's turning into a tree before it’s too late. It’s my take on the Pinocchio story and the book that got me my agent, Sara Crowe.
After writing such a fantastical story as Matteo, I wanted to write a story that was grounded in reality. The Civil War of Amos Abernathy is based on a lot of my own lived experience as a young person. I was a 19th-century historical reenactor. I spent many weekends at a local historical center dressing up as a boy from the 1800s, and I helped teach people about the past. I love it and did it from fourth to seventh grade.
I knew that I wanted to explore historical reenactment in some way and also homeschooling, since I was homeschooled. I also wanted to explore gay identity. I started thinking about how all these pieces could fit together, I realized, even at age 30, that I couldn't tell you hardly anything about the LGBTQ+ community's history that predated 1960. I was alarmed, and a little embarrassed, but it also lit a fire within me. So, I decided to give my character the task of discovering this. Amos’s questions became my own and I found Albert DJ Cashier, who would likely identify as a trans man today, who emigrated from Ireland as a teenager, enlisted with the Union Army, and fought for three years in the Civil War. I was completely captivated by Albert's story, and the book unfolded from there.
The Truth About Triangles also came from more of my lived experience. I wanted to write a story that celebrated my Italian American heritage, my first crush on a boy, as well as some of the tougher moments in my middle school years when I had to step up and take on more responsibility in my family, and deal with my parents' separation and divorce. What I ended up writing was a story about how young adults can get triangulated into relationships where they need to take on emotions, responsibilities of communicating, and the care of other people that often cannot be there for them.
Positive depictions of LGBTQ+ characters fill your novels. Why is this representation important to you?
Being gay, I grew up feeling ashamed of my identity. I hid it and it became a wound. This started eating me up as I went into college. I became massively depressed, and suffered from severe anxiety. I had to leave school for a time to come out and to deal with the things that I’d taken in and believed about myself. These beliefs included that I wouldn’t find love or connection or intimacy in a real way. But none of that was true. So, because of all of this, I write for the young person that I was. I write so that no other young people feel what I felt. My novels are about the realities of being a young queer person and the joys! I want my readers to know that they are seen, heard, respected, and loved—and that their identity is something to be proud of and celebrated, and that they get to be the star of a story.
You are writing queer coming of age stories during a time of rising book bans and discrimination against the LGBTQ+ community. Where does this bravery come from?
There's no other option for me. This is my life—the life of many—and the truth. We live in an era of deception and lies around what it means to be a queer person. Growing up, I took in so many of those lies. But now that I’ve done so much learning and growing, I have an opportunity to share stories that shine a light on all the potential that a queer person has to live, love, enjoy, and offer the world. It is a gift to be able to do this.
While I am deeply concerned about the book bans and the state of LGBTQ+ rights in our country, I am hopeful that we can all move forward and support each other and can see the humanity in each other. Everyone deserves to live a full and meaningful life, love who they love, and be free from harm. I think that the only way we can get there is to be open and willing to share all of our different stories.
