About
J. Albert Mann is a disability activist and award-winning author of eight published novels for children. She has an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts in Writing for Children and Young Adults. Her work has won the Massachusetts Book Award Honor, been long-listed for the South Carolina Book Award, received a Disability Visibility Grant, named both a Bank Street Best Book and a BCCB Blue Ribbon Ribbon Book, and has made the TAYSHAS Texas Reading List and BuzzFees’s Best YA List. Her first work of YA nonfiction publishes with HarperCollins in 2024. Born and raised in Jersey, she now lives on a fishing boat in the Boston Harbor.
Featured Work
The Degenerates
The Massachusetts School for the Feeble-Minded is not a happy place. The young women who are already there certainly don’t think so. Not Maxine, who is doing everything she can to protect her younger sister Rose in an institution where vicious attendants and bullying older girls treat them as the morons, imbeciles, and idiots the doctors have deemed them to be. Not Alice, either, who was left there when her brother couldn’t bring himself to support a sister with a club foot. And not London, who has just been dragged there from the best foster situation she’s ever had, thanks to one unexpected, life-altering moment. Each girl is determined to change her fate, no matter what it takes.
