Interview Tuesdays: Kristin Nilsen with @MaryLanniReads

Kristin Nilsen grew up in California and Minnesota, listening to the radio, watching Brady Bunch after school, and reading after bedtime. Vinyl records were still a thing and she had her very own collection of albums in her bedroom — like ABBA, The Bee Gees and the soundtracks to Grease and Star Wars. This is where she met all of her first crushes; they sang to her from the radio, her record player and the TV and eventually decorated the walls of her room with posters torn out of magazines.When the lights went out at bedtime, Kristin would pretend to fall asleep and sneak a flashlight under the covers to read just one more chapter. She grew up in a neighborhood full of readers, friends who’d call her up and say, “you wanna come over and read?” And then she moved to a new town and felt like a huge nerd because no one else read as much as she did. That’s when Judy Blume became her best friend; she read every Judy Blume book in the library – even the naughty ones written for adults – because all the people in Judy’s books seemed to have the same problems she did. Kristin finally got to meet Judy Blume as an adult, when she was writing Worldwide Crush, and told Judy that her influence on Worldwide Crush was undeniable. “If this book gets published,” Kristin said, “you can consider yourself one of its creators.”Kristin’s upcoming book, The Scott Fenwick Diaries (on sale 7/22/25 from SparkPress) is the sequel to Worldwide Crush and Nilsen’s second middle grade novel.You can hear Kristin every week on the Pop Culture Preservation Society podcast where she talks about the totally crushworthy pop culture nuggets of the 70s and 80s with her co-hosts Carolyn and Michelle. As the show’s Pro Crushologist (aka Andy-Gibb-ologist), her job legitimately involves studying why she once fantasized about being married to Andy Gibb and walking around their shared apartment in their bathrobes.Today, Kristin lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the city of lakes, with her husband and her chocolate goldendoodle, Axl Rose Nilsen (fur brother to her human child, Liam, who is in college but somehow still has dirty clothes on the floor of his old room).Learn more at: https://kristinnilsenbooks.com/