About Rebecca Stafford

the long version….

Hello!

I’m a writer and teacher, and I love to create smart, funny, complicated characters who are figuring themselves out, sometimes in the messiest way possible. Through them, I explore questions about what it means to be queer, when is a friendship real, what makes one love feel incandescent and another toxic, and how sometimes the most dangerous person in the room is the most magnetic. Most of all, I’m interested in what happens when you finally let someone in and they see you—the real you—the vulnerable self you’ve worked so hard to hide.

My second YA novel, The Ending You Deserve, is the story of Ava Quirk, a scholarship student at a prestigious arts school whose grades are tanking and whose social life is non-existent. She's about to lose her scholarship when her charming advisor offers her a strange deal. If she can befriend Love Solt, a brilliant, reclusive classmate—and get him the secret novel Love is writing— he'll make sure Ava stays. It doesn't feel right, but Ava already has a crush on Love, and she tells herself she's not hurting anyone. She takes the deal.

What she doesn't know yet is what's hiding inside Faraday's beautiful campus, or that the closer she gets to Love, the harder it will be to keep up her end of the deal. Ava is prickly and guarded and frequently wrong about things. Watching her slowly open up to real friendship and love is, for me, one of the greatest pleasures of the book. Also, there’s hide and seek in the dark, Pride and Prejudice reenactments, witty banter, a murderous chase, and a cat named Kikimora who doesn't like you.

I’m also a poet. My collections — Fair Copy, Vow, Gloss, and Generic Husband — are concerned with women navigating societal roles and shifting power dynamics in intimate relationships. My poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, The New Yorker, and Best American Poetry. I'm a two-time Pushcart Prize winner, a recipient of the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize, and have received fellowships from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and grants from the Illinois Arts Council and the Sustainable Arts Foundation.

Poetry made me a writer — I love the sounds of words and the patterns of sentences! — but it didn’t make me a novelist. For that, I had to start over from scratch. I started writing novels because I wanted to surprise myself — to be a beginner again, in a form where I didn't yet know the rules. So, I wrote draft after draft of novels that didn't work, trashing thousands of words and starting over, but understanding character and structure just a little better each time.

I didn’t take it seriously, not really, until I was at a writer's residency and found I couldn’t make myself write the poems I’d come to write—all I wanted to do was work on this weird idea I’d had about girls punching predatory boys in their faces. Plus, some kissing. One muggy, hot afternoon during the residency, I had been writing for hours in my studio when it began to rain. I kept going but stopped when I heard the inexplicable sounds of hail tapping against the windows. Stepping outside, I watched the unexpected little ice balls bounce off the ground and felt strangely peaceful, because I felt so satisfied with what I’d written. I realized then that this book was going to work. The characters were real and I cared about them. That manuscript became my first novel, Rabbit and Juliet.

I've been teaching writing for about twenty years and have been a Professor at North Central College for over a decade, where I teach undergraduates and in the Creative and Professional Writing master program. I hold an MFA in poetry from the University of Notre Dame and a PhD in English with a creative dissertation from Florida State University. I’m very proud of these things, although my cat peed on my MFA diploma so it’s not on my wall.

I am late-diagnosed AuDHD (autism + ADHD), something I only recently began to understand and write about openly. Like a lot of women my age, my neurodivergence went unnoticed as a child. I wasn’t disruptive in class, I got good grades (if I was interested), and I wasn’t bouncing off the walls. But I couldn’t read an analog clock or recite the months of the year in order, and my homework was always crumpled in the bottom of my bookbag. Plus, I was lonely. Some of this was self-inflicted (I was not tactful), but mostly it felt like everyone else had insider info on friendship, leaving me convinced that if I just had the right hair or the right clothes, I’d figure it out. Even today, friendship can be a little mysterious. Over the years, I learned the right performance for teaching, for parties, for getting through the day. I set constant alarms to keep me on top of meetings and deadlines. But the cost was high, and I was wearing myself out with more and more elaborate systems. At one point I spent weeks building a Notion database — a "second brain," the productivity videos called it — only to end up crying in a therapist's office because maintaining it was exhausting and I was still late to everything.

Getting diagnosed was bittersweet. It was a giant whooshing relief to know that I wasn’t careless, lazy, or stupid. But I couldn’t help but look backwards with grief at little me, not sure where to stand on the playground, or at all the days I’d overworked myself into a migraine. Learning to see my brain as different rather than broken is an ongoing project, and I write about some of it at my Substack, Fire Escape, about sustainable creative practice for neurodivergent writers.

I live in the greater Chicago area with my family and two cats, Butter and Toast. They are both very pretty and unambitious. I love video games — I am currently in the grips of Crimson Desert and may never escape—especially ones with amazing narratives like Disco Elysium or Horizon Zero Dawn. I practice yoga, sometimes, and every summer I grow a garden that reliably becomes a morass of creeping green horror. You can find me meandering around my neighborhood on my bicycle, secretly listening to love songs.