In 2020, following several conversations with YA readers, authors, librarians, and educators, it became clear that one of the challenges of short stories in young adult literature was that finding those by your favorite author can be cumbersome. Many authors keep a list of their contributions to anthologies on their website, but no single catalog of short stories made it possible to find as much information as possible about this common story format in a single place. I put together the ultimate guide to YA short stories here to both facilitate finding the information and to highlight how many short stories are out there for teen and YA readers.
That guide to YA short stories ended with those published in 2019. Five years have elapsed since then—and for many of us, the longest five years of our lives—and dozens of new YA short story collections have been published. It seems only appropriate to expand upon that original guide.
I’ve scoured through YA anthologies past and present—up to those published prior to 2024—and pulled together an index to their contents by author. This is meant to help you seek out stories by your favorite authors, with a guide to the books in which they appear.
The task of compiling this information is not quick, easy, or without limitation. This index to YA short stories does not include short stories which are interconnected in an anthology. That leaves out a few books, but not as many as one might anticipate. Shaun David Hutchinson’s anthologies and Hungry Hearts, edited by Elise Chapman and Caroline Tung Richmond, are examples of this type of book. Those can and should get their own kind of recognition. This index also doesn’t include short story collections by a single author. Holly Black and Kelly Link are two, among many others, who’ve done solo short story collections. Likewise, the index does not include short stories only published online or in genre publications. Those are much more difficult to track down and are, again, worthy of their own compilation.
I’ve used my knowledge of YA to whittle down the index here to YA authors who are well-known, well-published, or new and emerging voices. Some haven’t yet published a YA title, while others haven’t done so in quite a while; YA authors who have only published in YA anthologies thus far are included if they’ve published several short stories. I’ve pulled from this list YA short stories by adult authors who haven’t written for YA otherwise unless they edited the collection. This is to keep the index limited to YA short stories by YA authors.
The short stories below are organized by the author’s last name. Each of the stories and their respective anthologies are listed below the author, and in cases where stories are co-authored, the story appears under both author names. I haven’t included descriptions of the story because that’s impossible without having read them all. But by including the book in which you can find the story, it should give a good idea of the themes the story might have. Perhaps it’ll encourage the ultimate goal of this project, which is to get more people excited to read short stories. After all, the 2024 Printz Award—the highest honor given to a work of young adult literature—was given for the first time to a collection of short stories, The Collectors edited by A. S. King.
Some of these books might be out of print since they’re beyond 10 years old. But chances are you can track them down at a library, and some of the authors may have republished these stories on their websites or elsewhere, depending on whether or not they own the republication rights.
Again, this isn’t comprehensive, but it is pretty robust and, I hope, useful for readers seeking YA short stories by their favorite YA writers.
