How far is too far?” It’s a question many are asking themselves as technology continues its rapid expansion, and it’s the question at the core of Jill Tew’s YA science fiction debut, The Dividing Sky (Joy Revolution).
Before Tew began questioning humanity’s trajectory, she was a girl growing up in Atlanta who loved the possibility of the future. Spending evenings watching Farscape (which she recognizes she “probably should not have been watching as a child with my dad,” she says) and blazing through the Animorphs series, where a Black female protagonist “was a big deal for me,” Tew developed a love of storytelling early on. But during her high school years when Tew thought about her own future, she wanted to “make a choice based on what I knew about the world and what my parents had taught me, which is that you need to be able to provide for yourself.” She opted for the “practical route,” pursuing a degree in business at the University of Pennsylvania.
Tew became an exemplary model for success: postgraduation, she kickstarted her career as a management consultant. It was within the corporate setting, where Tew had so little time for herself that she became willing to outsource any activity from delivering groceries to caring for her dog, that the first inkling of her dystopian YA debut was planted.
Eventually, Tew pivoted to more creative work developing online courses on crafting, but the possibility of becoming a writer didn’t emerge until 2014. Following a movie night screening of Divergent, Tew remembered what it was she loved about dystopian storytelling. “Walking home from the theater, I remembered what it feels like when sci-fi stories come alive,” she recalls. “I remembered what it feels like to see a tale well told.” She realized, “I don’t want to spend the rest of my days making PowerPoint slides.”
In 2020, with the publishing industry in disarray due to the pandemic, Diana M. Pho, a former editor at Tor, hosted an online contest to discover emerging authors of science fiction. The selected manuscript earned a year’s worth of developmental edits from Pho. Tew, the winner of the contest, had spent six years since that movie night working on a parallel universes science fiction story for adults, and with Pho’s help polishing her manuscript, she was ready to query. That book is how Tew hooked her agent, Jennifer Azantian at Azantian Literary Agency, whom Tew says she admired for being “one of the few agents at the time who refused to believe that sci-fi was dead.”
Though that adult title didn’t get any takers, Tew was armed with new industry know-how and returned to her initial idea of society’s technology going too far. She wrote the first draft of The Dividing Sky in 90 days—a stark shift from her first project. She’d wake up early in the morning to write before spending the day caring for her youngest children, who were three and four at the time. Azantian recognized the potential in this new venture, and Tew says they both hoped that “the editor who ended up acquiring the book understood and didn’t try to simplify it or water it down.”
The Dividing Sky found its home in 2022 with David and Nicola Yoon’s YA imprint Joy Revolution, and editor Bria Ragin. Though the imprint was in its early stages, Tew believed in the Yoons’ mission to amplify BIPOC love stories. “I loved the idea of an imprint that was looking at stories by authors of color, about characters of color, in the full breadth of everything that we go through in life,” Tew says.
Under Joy Revolution, Tew’s tale underwent a tonal shift, she says, noting that the book had originally been “halfway between a true dystopian adventure and a romance.” Ragin provided the insight to “bring the stakes closer and more intimate,” making for a true melding of the sci-fi and romance genres.
“I feel like it does both genres really well,” Tew says. “It’s asking these big questions like ‘At what point are we trading something maybe we don’t want to give up?’ and also has a really satisfying, rewarding love story at the end.”
The Dividing Sky has earned several starred reviews and was selected as an Indie Next Pick and a PW Best Book of 2024. Tew is moving full speed ahead: the prequel to The Dividing Sky, titled An Ocean Apart, set in the near future in a flooded Miami, is scheduled for release in 2025. And her middle grade debut, Kaya Morgan’s Crowning Achievement, which sold to Disney’s Freedom Fire imprint in a six-figure deal, is also due out next year.
For Tew, what has mattered most is offering young readers a flashlight in a world that can often feel dark. “I wrote this book as a beacon into the night,” Tew says. “This is what life feels like for me right now. And for a reader to say it’s resonating is all I wanted and all I can ask for.”
