Hidden Gems: Meet Lee Wind of Independent Book Publishers Association

Today we’d like to introduce you to Lee Wind.

Hi Lee, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
I’ve always been into writing stories, since I was a kid. After grad school in Boston, I moved out to Los Angeles to pursue telling stories through film. I wrote a bunch of screenplays that didn’t get produced, while I worked a lot of different industry jobs until I ended up editing television.
Along the way I came out as a Gay man, fell in love, got married, and my husband and I had a child. As a new parent (22 years ago) I shifted my creative focus away from screenplays to writing books for kids and teens.
I didn’t gain any traction until I decided to stop being closeted with what I was writing. When I realized writing was an opportunity to heal my own inner child, and write the books I wish I had read when I was a kid, a tween, a teen. Picture books with two dad families and social justice themes. Nonfiction for kids that spotlighted LGBTQIA2+ History. Teen adventure novels where the gay teens got to be the heroes, and fall in love.
That was the shift in my creative journey as a writer. It took a lot more years to break through, but as I write this, book number eight just came out (the picture book BANANA MENORAH, illustrated by Karl West and published by Apples & Honey Press/Behrman House, where a little girl with two dads has to get creative to save their Hanukkah celebration), and I’m working on the copy edits for book nine, A DIFFERENT KIND OF ENEMY (a YA novel coming out May 2026 from Interlude Press/Duet/Chicago Review Press. It’s the sequel to my gay teen action adventure romance novel, A DIFFERENT KIND OF BRAVE.)
There’s a great moment in the book BIRD BY BIRD by Anne Lamott, where she talks about how lighthouses don’t run all over an island looking for boats to save. They just stand there and shine.
I think about that a lot, in terms of my being an author. Every book I put out into the world is another light on in my lighthouse. Not every book is for everyone, but for those who are interested, I’m trying to have each book shine its brightest.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
It has not been a smooth road at all. The first book I ever sold the rights to was my nonfiction for readers age 11 and up NO WAY, THEY WERE GAY? It sold to an imprint of one of the big corporate publishers. I worked on it with them for over a year until our current president was elected the first time. They freaked out and cancelled the contract.
I got the rights back, but it took a long time to find a publisher brave enough to put out a history book for young readers—packed with primary source evidence—about men who loved men, women who loved women, people who loved without regard to gender, and people who lived outside the boundaries of gender. Especially since some of those people were famous – including Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi, and Eleanor Roosevelt.
NO WAY, THEY WERE GAY? was at long last published by Zest Books/Lerner Publishing Group in 2021, and won a number of accolades, including: the International Literacy Association’s Children’s and Young Adult Award for best Nonfiction; The Children’s Book Committee at Bank Street College Best Children’s Book of the Year, Winner; The Chicago Public Library Best of the Best Books, Winner; and it was chosen as a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard selection (meaning it was sent to hundreds of libraries to be included in their collections.)
It’s also my most frequently challenged and banned title.
But I don’t write my books for the haters. I write them for the people that want this light.

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
Writing books for kids and teens is the work of my heart, but I also have a day job because—well, it’s nice to eat. Maybe someday books will fully support me and my family, but until then I’m grateful to work at the Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA), a nonprofit trade association of independent publishers where I’m the Chief Content Officer.
I’m most proud of two things I’ve done in my day job. The first is that during the pandemic, I re-tooled one of our cooperative marketing programs to be a fundraiser for Binc, the Book Industry Charitable Foundation, to support booksellers. We’ve since used the program to donate to a number of other nonprofits in the publishing industry, including NABU (working on global literacy), Benetech (to help make Ebooks more accessible across the industry), and We Need Diverse Books (innovating to make children’s publishing in the US more diverse—both the books, the authors, and the people working in the industry.) To date IBPA has donated over $30,000 to publishing industry nonprofits through this program.
The other innovation was directly a result of my own books, like NO WAY, THEY WERE GAY?, being banned. Because of that I met Dr. Tasslyn Magnusson, who holds the data on book banning in the US, and hosts these zoom meetings for authors in the position I was in. Tasslyn and I became friends, and over the course of a few months tried to come up with an answer to the question, “how do we stop playing defense?” It seemed like everything we were doing on the side of the freedom to read was defense, and we both wanted a way to play offense.
Together we came up with We Are Stronger Than Censorship, a program that buys and donates two books to offset every one book challenge. It launched in September 2024 and to date we’ve raised enough to buy and donate 2,800 books, offsetting 1,400 book challenges!
It’s partly about making the numbers work against the book banners — the more they ban the more we donate. And hopefully, if we can gain enough traction, it will slow their roll.
It’s partly to show how much diversity in publishing is coming from independent mission-driven publishers like Levine Querido, Just Us Books, Lee & Low, Lerner, and so many more. It’s not just the five big corporate publishers putting out wonderful work!
And it’s also trying to educate folks that book banning isn’t really about the books. It’s about a relatively small number of people trying to create a chilling effect, where teachers and librarians will be afraid to bring in any kinds of diverse books. These people are trying to push all kinds of diverse people back into the closet, and the answer to that is an emphatic “NO.”
What I’ve learned on my journey as a Gay man, as the “G” of the LGBTQIA2+ community, is that I have to be an ally to all the other letters of my rainbow community, and also to women, and to people of color, and to indigenous people, and to immigrants, and to disabled people… to everyone who isn’t getting a fair shot at being their full selves, living their fullest lives.
Books are empathy machines, and I’m grateful to be writing them, and proud to be fighting for them.

Do you any memories from childhood that you can share with us?
Reading. As a kiddo, I loved me some Dr. Seuss (GREEN EGGS AND HAM), and P.D. Eastman’s GO, DOG. GO! As a tween I was obsessed with Anne McCaffrey’s DRAGONRIDERS series. And I read DUNE by Frank Herbert every year for nine years, from age 11 to age 20.
It’s pretty thrilling to be writing books that maybe someday, someone will have as their own favorite childhood memory!

Contact Info:

• Website: Lee Wind author website: https://www.leewind.org/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamleewind/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leewind/
• Other: We Are Stronger Than Censorship website: https://www.wearestrongerthancensorship.org/

Image Credits
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