Children's Literature Festival of the Ozarks
Meet our 2026 Authors
Jody Feldman
Featured author of the week
Award-winning, middle grade and young adult author Jody Feldman had early thoughts of working as a treasure hunter, a codebreaker, a movie director, and an inventor. Through a series of happenstances, however, she enrolled in the University of Missouri School of Journalism and discovered she really could write.
Her middle-grade novels—The Seventh Level and The Gollywhopper Games series (HarperCollins/Greenwillow)—have appeared on 26 state reading lists and have won, among other honors, the Georgia Children’s Book Award and the Grand Canyon Readers Award. School Library Journal calls her debut YA novel, No Way Home (Sourcebooks, 2022), an “excellent choice for any young adult collection… also appropriate for mature middle school readers.” And says that, “Fans of mystery/thrillers with puzzles…will devour this book.”
Stephanie Bearce
Jackson
Pearce
