Back in 2017, sisters Mel and Teghan Hammond were at very different places in their lives. Mel Hammond, who is older by five years, was working as a technical writer at Epic Systems and writing children’s and young adult novels in her free time. Teghan Hammond was a proud trans woman incarcerated in a men’s prison in Indiana, where her identity was something she had to fight to protect.
“One of the few things Mel was allowed to send Teghan in prison were books,” the sisters told me in a joint interview. “As long as they were paperback, directly from Amazon, and without any fun stuff like violence or nudity.”
However, it didn’t take long to run out of books featuring trans women protagonists.
“So, we thought, why don’t we write one?”
They did. ” Lucy, Uncensored ” — intended for readers ages 14-18 but a delightful and poignant page-turner for adults as well — was published by Knopf Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Penguin Random House, on Oct. 8. Mel Hammond has also written several nonfiction titles for American Girl, one of which became the target of a transphobic hate campaign in 2022, which you can read more about in the Q&A below.