Are you a student looking for information about Jodi? This is a great place to start. Jodi answers 36 frequently asked questions! Make sure you read the BIO on the ABOUT page too.
Yup. I’ve been to Death Row in Arizona, twice now. It’s a very strange place – in all the years I’ve been doing research, I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a cloud of secrecy like the one I found there. I was literally on a plane when my visit was being nearly cancelled – I had to arrive at the facility and talk my way into it, because they decided if I was a writer, I must be “media”. I was able to charm the authorities into giving me a tour of their death row – which is more serene than you’d think, because the inmates are locked into their individual cells 23 hours a day. Then I begged to be taken to the execution chamber – the Death House, as it used to be called in Arizona. It was while I was examining their gas chamber (Arizona uses both gas and lethal injection) that the warden approached me to ask me again who I was, and why I was writing a book about this. She definitely had her guard up – and wasn’t budging an inch. We started talking about the last execution in Arizona; and at some point she mentioned she was a practicing Catholic. “If you’re Catholic,” I said, “do you think the death penalty is a good thing?” She stared at me for a long moment, and then said, “I used to.” From that moment on, the wall between us came down, and she was willing to tell me everything I wanted and needed to know – including scenes you’ll see in this book in 2008, a backstage look at how an execution happens. The most jarring moments in my research trip? Speaking to a condemned man – who was convicted of murdering someone by shooting battery acid into his veins – yet who also called me Ma’am and cried when he started to talk about his late grandfather. And talking to the warden in the death house, when I was having trouble juggling noteBooks and papers, and leaned against the closest surface to take notes more easily…only to realize I was sprawled across the lethal injection gurney.
The counterpart of the research I’ve done on death row involves holing up in my office wading through the gospels for research…not just the ones that made it into the Bible, but the ones that didn’t, like the Gospel of Thomas – a gospel found in 1945 in Nag Hammadi, Egypt. Like the other 51 texts found at Nag Hammadi, they contain a lot of sayings you can find in the Bible…and a lot you won’t. These are referred to as the Gnostic gospels – part and parcel of a religious movement that was denounced as heresy by Orthodox Christianity in the middle of the second century. Gnosis means knowledge in Greek – and the basis for their beliefs is that if you want to know God, you have to know yourself. Or in other words, there’s a little bit of divinity in all of us, coded and hidden…and it’s up to each of us to figure out how to get it out. The Gnostics felt that religion was something that by definition had to be personal – and that if you simply believed what others told you to believe or said the right words during a church service or just got baptized, it wasn’t enough to reach spiritual fulfillment. Above all else, the Gnostics said, ask questions. Don’t believe everything you’re told; don’t assume that just because someone says “This is the way it should be done” that he or she is right. There are a lot of good reasons – political and religious – why Orthodox Christianity rejected the Gnostic movement…but something else was lost along with those gospels – the belief that people might reach spiritual enlightenment in a variety in ways, rather than one “right” way. “If you bring forth what is within you,” Jesus says, in the Gospel of Thomas, “what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” Sounds like a riddle, right? But it’s actually pretty simple: The potential to free yourself – or ruin yourself – is entirely up to you. Which gets pretty interesting when you’re talking about a condemned man who happens to think that donating his heart to the sister of his victim is the way to save himself.
THE STORYTELLER book actually began with another book – Simon Wiesenthal’s THE SUNFLOWER. In it, Mr. Wiesenthal recounts a moment when, as a concentration camp prisoner, he was brought to the bedside of a dying Nazi, who wanted to confess to and be forgiven by a Jew. The moral conundrum in which Wiesenthal found himself has been the starting point for many philosophical and moral analyses about the dynamics between victims of genocide and the perpetrators…and it got me thinking about what would happen if the same request was made, decades later, to a Jewish prisoner’s granddaughter.
Naturally, this research was among some of the most emotionally grueling I’ve ever done. I met with several Holocaust survivors, who told me their stories. Some of those details went into the fictional history of my character, Minka. It was humbling and horrifying to realize that the stories they recounted were non-fiction. Some of the moments these brave men and women told me will stay with me forever: such as Bernie, who pried a mezuzah from his door frame as the Nazis dragged him from his home, and held it curled in his fist throughout the entire war – so that it took two years to straighten his fingers after liberation. Or how his mother promised him that he would not be shot in the head, only the chest – can you imagine making that promise to your child?! Or Gerda – who won the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and who survived a 350 mile march in January 1945 – because, she told me, her father had told her to wear her ski boots when she was taken from home. Or Mania, whose mastery of the German language saved her life multiple times during the war, when she was picked to work in office jobs instead of in hard labor; and who told me of Herr Baker, her German boss at one factory, who called the young Jewish women who were assigned to him Meine Kinder (my children) and who saved his workers from being selected by the Nazis during a concentration camp roundup. At Bergen Belsen, she slept in a barrack with 900 people and contracted typhoid – and would have died, if the British had not come then to liberate them.
I also had the pleasure of interviewing the director of Human Rights Enforcement Strategy and Policy in the Human Rights & Special Prosecutions section of the Department of Justice – a real-life Nazi hunter. Lest you wonder why this topic is still important, even after nearly 70 years – I will leave you with a story he told me. Years ago, after extensive work, his department finally was ready to question an 85 year old man who had been a Nazi guard and who was now living in Ohio. He refused to come in for questioning, so law enforcement professionals surrounded his house. He came outside with a gun. As the police lifted their own weapons he said, “Why you shoot at me? I not Jew.” Seventy years may have passed, but prejudice is alive and well.
God knows that racism is one of the most pressing issues in this country today, and it’s weighed on me for a long time. I’d wanted to write about race and racism for twenty years but couldn’t seem to find a way to do it . After all, who am I – as a white woman who’s had plenty of privilege – to tell someone of color what her life is like? I didn’t know why I was able to channel the voice of a school shooter, a boy with autism, a rape victim, etc. but I couldn’t feel comfortable writing from the perspective of a person of color. But racism is different. It’s fraught, and hard to discuss, and we tend to be afraid of offending people by saying the wrong thing – and so often white people don’t talk about it AT ALL. Then I came across a news story about a Black nurse who’d help deliver a baby, only to have the father call her supervisor in and request that she not touch his infant - and neither should anyone else who looked like her. He revealed to the supervisor a swastika tattoo – he was a Skinhead. The hospital put a note in the baby’s file, and in real life the African American personnel sued the hospital for discrimination and won. But I wondered…what if? What if that nurse had been alone with that baby and something went wrong? What if she wound up on trial and defended by a white public defender who, like many of my friends, would never consider herself a racist? What if their interaction led them both to realize that what they’d been taught about race and racism might not be what actually is true? Suddenly I knew why I would be able to finish this book – I was addressing the wrong audience. I didn’t need to communicate what it’s like to be Black in America. I needed to communicate to other white people like myself that even though they might not think of themselves as racist, racism is not just about prejudice – it’s about power – and that in addition to the headwinds of racism faced by people of color, there are tailwinds of racism that benefit white people. It’s very hard to admit that our success is not a result of hard work or luck but also quite possibly the fact that we had opportunities a person of color did NOT.
I knew I couldn’t ask readers to take a journey of soul searching about privilege and prejudice unless I did, too. So I attended social justice workshops, and left in tears every night. I read the work of anti-racism activists and met with social justice educators. I sat down with women of color who excused my ignorance and welcomed me into their lives and memories – and who vetted, personally, the voice of the character Ruth.
What did I learn? To open my eyes to the privilege I’ve had. To realize that ignorance about racism is a privilege in and of itself (when was the last time you talked to your kids at dinner about racism? If you’re white, the answer may vary. If you’re Black, the answer is Every night.) To recognize that although racism is system and institutional, it is perpetuated and dismantled in individual acts. SMALL GREAT THINGS has pushed me the furthest into confronting my own unseen prejudices and privileges as a white woman in America. Too often, and too recently, we have seen acts of violence taking place that have a root of racism at their core…yet racism is never mentioned in the courtroom proceedings following. Think about the George Zimmerman trial, for example. Most people referred to it as the Trayvon Martin trial – yet Trayvon Martin was the deceased victim, and was not on trial – and racism was never mentioned as a motive for that shooting, although there was plenty of talk in the media about the terror factor of a dark-skinned boy in a hoodie. Why is race something both prosecutors and defense attorneys shy away from discussing in court? Why is a place like Ferguson, Missouri such a powderkeg, waiting for the right spark to ignite? Why would many whites tell you that racism isn’t as bad as it used to be…but people of color say differently? And in terms of publishing – why are books about modern day racism written usually by authors of color, while white writers choose the safer route of addressing racism from a historical perspective? The answer is because racism is the one conversation this country doesn’t want to have. I hope this book makes people brave enough to start discussions. As we undertake this journey we may all be at different places, and we may say things that are offensive or wrong without realizing it – but it’s better to do so and apologize and learn from the mistake than to not talk about racism at all.
During Covid we were all considering what an alternative life might look like – namely one that didn’t involve a pandemic. THE BOOK OF TWO WAYS began as a question: who would you be, if you aren’t who you are now? What if your life had taken a different turn? For all of us, there is something or someone who got away. What if you had the chance for a do-over?
Years ago, my eldest son Kyle, a Yale Egyptology major, was reading an ancient text called The Book Of Two Ways. Without knowing anything about it, I said, “That’s a great title for a book.” Then I learned that it is part of the Coffin Texts, a series of spells found in the coffins of nobles in the Middle Kingdom of Egypt which gave the deceased the knowledge they needed to get to the afterlife. The Book Of Two Ways is special because it’s the first known map of the afterlife, with two potential routes – water or land – that lead to the same spot. I decided to create a novel around this metaphor, following a woman, Dawn Edelstein, who suffers a near-death experience when her plane goes down. But when her life flashes before her eyes, instead of seeing her husband and her daughter and her work as a death doula, she envisions what she left behind fifteen years earlier – a career in Egyptology, and another man she loved. When she survives the crash, she is at a crossroads – and (like many of us) decides to revisit and reevaluate her past decisions. I am known for doing a ton of research, and this book was no different – taking me from the tombs of Middle Egypt to the bedsides of those in hospice, and the professionals who care for them. I realized we have been asking the same question for the past 4000 years: will you be happy at the end of your life? The answer is hinted at on the walls of those Ancient Egyptian tombs, which feature pictures of the deceased fishing, fowling, dancing, making beer and bread, being with family. The way to have a good death -- then and now -- is to have a good life.
Struggling through COVID-19 gives an urgency and a tenderness to the matter of what makes a life worth living; and how to face the end of that life without regret. I hope that as you read this novel, it allows you to think about the forks in your own path that you have taken. Do we make choices…or do our choices make us?
Yes. BETWEEN THE LINES was the first one that I adapted, along with my co-librettist Tim McDonald and songwriters Kate Anderson and Elyssa Samsel. It is based off the YA series I wrote with my daughter, Samantha van Leer. The musical debuted off-Broadway in 2022 and you can watch it now on Amazon Prime: https://www.amazon.com/Between-Lines-Jeff-Calhoun/dp/B0DFX1M65K. Tim and I also collaborated on BREATHE, a musical about Covid that was inducted into the Library of Congress COVID-19 Artist Response Collection. We also adapted The Book Thief (UK, 2022/23, West End Concert, October 2025), based on the international bestselling novel by Markus Zusak; and Austenland (West End concert, March 2025).
NINETEEN MINUTES was the most banned book in America in 2024, and you are the fourth most banned author in America in 2025. How does that make you feel?
Book banning has increased more than 1100% since 2020, with more than ten thousand individual bans across the country in 2025. The books being banned at school districts in this country tend to fall into three categories: those written by BIPOC authors, those written by LGBTQ authors, and those with sexual content.
In most school districts where my book has been challenged, those doing the challenging have not even read the books. They have been provided with a list of titles from Moms For Liberty members in other communities who express “concern” for what children are being exposed to. Make no mistake —what children are being exposed to are ideas and lives different from their own, which creates compassion and empathy. Or, in some cases, children are being exposed to ideas and lives EXACTLY like their own, which provides representation and validity and a sense of belonging. The books on these lists are not salacious or revolutionary. They are just the kind of books that help kids learn to think for themselves…which is the point of an educational system, and which is also terrifying to a certain small subset of Americans right now. Although it is legitimate for a parent to decide what is appropriate for his or her child, they have no right to make that decision for another parent’s child..,or to remove access to a book that other child might need.
NINETEEN MINUTES is about a school shooting, and the effects of bullying. Yet the reason it is banned is usually because of a single page that depicts a date rape, and uses the word “erection.” It is not a gratuitous scene and it is not salacious. Yet it has been challenged as “porn.” The definition of porn includes a piece having no literary or artistic merit. NINETEEN MINUTES has won multiple state book awards, including those in Texas, Illinois, Iowa, and New Hampshire, as well as an award from the ALA. I have spoken out at countless schools across this country and have received thousands of letters and emails and there have been hundreds — HUNDREDS - of kids who said that NINETEEN MINUTES was the reason they DIDN’T bring a gun to school and start shooting. Instead, the novel made them realize they weren’t the only ones who felt so isolated. The book did not harm them; it gave them tools to deal with an increasingly divided, difficult world.
I know, as do many of my writer friends who wind up on these lists, that it is the work of a select few individuals who are championing book challenges. What we hear most often is “Oh, that’s just gonna drive up sales!” Trust me, none of us want that. What we want is for kids to be able to read what they want to read, instead of being told what they should read. We want the great majority of folks in communities who support the freedom to read to be just as loud as those select few who are making so much noise against it. We want you to stand in solidarity with us, the writers who create windows through which kids can escape and mirrors in which they can find themselves. Because we’ve seen what the next chapter looks like, historically, when we don’t speak out against book challenges…and it’s not pretty.
