Illustration by Allegra Lockstadt.

Hi, Rookies! We have some exciting news!

Lots of you have been asking if/when our next book is coming out. And the exciting news is: YES, and SOON! It’s called Rookie on Love, and it will be released January 2, 2018. Mark your calendars!

After finishing Yearbook Four, we started talking about what kinds of books we were eager to publish and you’d be eager to read. We wanted the Yearbook series to be comprised of four books, one for each year of high school, and thought the next iteration of Rookie in print should take a new form. With our monthly themes on the site, we get to see the different ideas that the same prompt evokes in our artists, writers, and readers. So, we decided to dedicate a whole book to the range of experience and talent that presents itself when you ask a handful of insightful people to reflect on the same topic. And, where our Yearbooks were meant to crystallize the magic shared within our online community, we wanted to publish new work that had never been seen before, delving deeper into topics that you/we already think about, talk about, write about, and obsess over.

So, we present: Rookie on Love! We’ve commissioned brand new work about all kinds of love from some of our favorite voices (45, to be exact): teens, Growns, readers, frequent Rookie contributors, and lots of artists, writers, and thinkers we admire. Everyone responded with a different type of love they wanted to explore: self-love, family-love, friend-love, dog-love; the intense fandom and devotion reserved for music, books, movies, and the act of making all of those things; and, of course, romantic love—from crushes to breakups and back again. Some of them addressed questions like: How do I stop being jealous? How do I get over rejection? What do “self-love” and “self-respect” and “self-care” actually feel like? WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO ACTUALLY CONNECT WITH ANOTHER HUMAN BEING? And when you’ve done that, how do you convert that feeling into words, song, a movie, a…multi-contributor book? :) :) ;)

In Rookie on Love you will find essays, poems, comics, and interviews by some of your beloved Rookie regulars (Jenny Zhang, Ogechi and Ugochi Egonu, Esme Blegvad, Amy Rose Spiegel, Britney Franco, Annie Mok, Kiana Flores, Krista Burton, Upasna Barath, Sunny Betz, Danielle Henderson, Emma Straub, Victoria Chiu, Tova Benjamin, Hilton Als, Diamond Sharp, Gaby Gloria, Laia Garcia, and yours truly), plus Rookie readers, AND!!! some of our idols, like Janet Mock, John Green, Rainbow Rowell, Gabourey Sidibe, Mitski, Alessia Cara, Etgar Keret, Margo Jefferson, Sarah Manguso, Durga Chew-Bose, AND SO MANY MORE.

And! That stunning illustration up there? That’s the cover, and it’s by Allegra Lockstadt, who you may know from any of her bazillion other Rookie pieces. Thank you, Allegra!

You can find Rookie on Love in bookstores on January 2, 2018, and you can pre-order it today via our publisher, on Amazon, or at your local bookstore, for $13.95! Plus, we’ll be doing book events—reading and signing and making bad jokes, et cetera—next year, too. Please tell us what cities you’d like to see us in as we compile our wish list of stops!

I hope you LOVE this book as much as we LOVED making it, and not in a weird vague LIVE LAUGH LOVE/ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE/I JUST DO EVERYTHING FROM A PLACE OF LOVE AND THEN LIFE IS SUDDENLY EASY way, but like, in the way that actively engaging with all these questions about the world’s most mysterious, powerful emotion is really very good for your heart and brain. If you’re hankering for a book that invites dog-ears, notes to self, and lending to best friends, I think this is maybe the ultimate that.

So! See you on tour, and enjoy the shit out of this thing.
Love (!),
Tavi