Erin Entrada Kelly is one of the most decorated authors of children's fiction working today. She won the Newbery Medal in 2018 for Hello, Universe and a second Newbery Medal in 2025 for The First State of Being, joining a small group of writers to win it twice; We Dream of Space took a Newbery Honor in between, in 2021.

Her Filipino heritage runs straight through the books. Her mother is Visayan, from the Cebu region, which is why Kelly's Filipino characters speak Cebuano rather than Tagalog, and she has said a Filipino child reading her work should recognize the exact dialect of home. She has spoken about growing up as the only Filipino student at her school, and about writing the kid on the margin because she was one. In Hello, Universe, the young hero leans on the dark folk tales told by his Filipina grandmother.

Beyond the prize winners she has built a deep shelf for young readers, including Blackbird Fly, The Land of Forgotten Girls, You Go First, the folklore-rooted Lalani of the Distant Sea, and Those Kids from Fawn Creek, along with the illustrated Maybe Maybe Marisol Rainey books for younger children. Hello, Universe alone has appeared in translations from Spanish and Turkish to Chinese, carrying a Filipino-American story far beyond the United States.

Kelly came to fiction after years as a journalist, magazine editor, and book publicist, was raised in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and now lives near Philadelphia. She teaches in the writing for children and young adults program at Hamline University, and The First State of Being was a 2024 National Book Award finalist before it won the Newbery.

Her recurring subject is the inner life of children who feel overlooked, the lonely and the anxious and the kids on the social margin, written without condescension and with an ear for how cruel and how kind young people can be. Two Newbery Medals make her one of the most honored Filipino-American authors writing for young readers, and a natural inclusion here.

Selected and fact-checked against Hardcover and Open Library.