Anica Mrose Rissi

Anica Mrose Rissi grew up on an island off the coast of Maine. After college she moved to New York City, worked as a cheesemonger and an executive editor in children's-book publishing, and later made her home in central New Jersey. Her work now spans picture books, chapter books, middle-grade fiction, and young-adult novels, alongside essays, teaching, school visits, and songwriting and fiddle playing with Owen Lake and the Tragic Loves.

Rissi's bibliography moves between the social complications of the eight-book Anna, Banana chapter-book series, picture books including The Teacher's Pet, the relationship pressures of the young-adult novels Always Forever Maybe and Nobody Knows But You, and the grief and connection at the center of Wishing Season. The breadth of format is matched by a recurring interest in how friendship, fear, memory, and difficult emotions shape young people's decisions.

Hide and Don't Seek grew from an endless hide-and-seek story Rissi wrote for herself and her nieces at her childhood home in Maine. She drafted thirteen scary stories in one summer, read them aloud as part of revision, and added seven more after the collection sold. The finished book shifts among conventional prose, text messages, letters, verse, and a play script, using sensory detail and playful dark humor to compress suspense into very short forms.

The collection also carries social questions beneath its scares. Rissi connects one pair of crow stories to boundaries, consent, gender expectations, patriarchy, and systemic racism. YALSA selected Hide and Don't Seek for its 2022 Quick Picks for Reluctant Young Adult Readers list, while Kirkus found its variety and cumulative effect successful even as it judged some approaches stronger than others.