Some author-illustrators invent their stories from imagination, others draw on their own lives. Award-winning graphic novelist Raina Telgemeier has done both. Raina loved comics as a child growing up in San Francisco. Her favorites were Calvin and Hobbes and For Better or for Worse. She began creating her own comics about that time, realizing that she "liked putting pictures and words together to tell stories."

When Raina was in sixth grade, she fell and knocked out her teeth—an accident that required braces, years of surgery, and lots of awkward smiles. Mocked and teased by her classmates, she withdrew into her love of drawing, eventually finding friends in high school who could appreciate her artistic gifts. The comic Smile was born out of a need to process that experience by getting it down on paper. A few years later her graphic novel Sisters, also autobiographical, won an Eisner Award.

Raina Telgemeier is one of the most popular illustrator-storytellers working today, with credits on DC Comics, X-Men: Misfits, and The Baby-Sitters Club, for which she is the series illustrator. In 2016, she published Ghosts, about a girl and her family moving to a new town, where she sees spirits and celebrates the Day of the Dead.