Focus Features

Ned Vizzini, the author of It’s Kind of a Funny Story – the book that inspired Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden’s current Focus Features release starring Zach Galifianakis – is a literary role model. Since his teens, Vizzini has been writing about the trials and tribulations of being a teenager, first in columns for the New York Press and the New York Times Magazine, and then as the author of the bestselling books Teen Angst? Naaah..., Be More Chill and It’s Kind of a Funny Story. And his writing has made an impact of countless readers, both within the “young adult” demographic and beyond it.

Vizzini is also a film literate writer – before Funny Story, his book Be More Chill was optioned for a movie, and in our interview with him Vizzini told us about his own film Attack of the Killer Turtle – and we were inspired to find more young adult authors with a passion for cinema. So we reached out to a group of Vizzini’s esteemed fellow YA novelists and were delighted to receive an abundance of enthusiastic responses.

Below, offering up a list of their favorite teen movies are: Laura Ruby, the gifted novelist of Good Girls and Bad Apple, among others; Laurie Halse Anderson, the New York Times-bestselling author of Speak and Chains; Keith McGowan, whose award-winning debut novel The Witch’s Guide to Cooking with Children came out in 2009; Deb Caletti, the National Book Award finalist who wrote The Nature of Jade, The Secret Life of Prince Charming, and Honey, Baby Sweetheart; the poet and YA novelist Ronald Koertge, author of the 2010 book Shakespeare Makes The Playoffs; Sonya Sones, the award-winning writer of Stop Pretending and What My Mother Doesn’t Know; and Ann Dee Ellis, who received rave reviews for her books This is What I Did and Everything is Fine.