Rachel Manija Brown

Rachel Manija Brown is an American author and poet, born in 1973, who writes primarily fantasy and paranormal fiction. She began publishing genre fiction with short stories including River of Heaven (2009) and the collection A Cup of Smoke: Stories and Poems (2013), which draws on steampunk-inflected Western settings. She is best known for the young adult Change series, co-written with Sherwood Smith, beginning with Stranger (2014): set in a transformed, post-apocalyptic version of the American West, the books follow a small community in a reshaped Los Angeles where a scattering of survivors have gained extraordinary abilities through mutation. The series continued with Hostage (2015), Rebel (2017), and Traitor (2024), maintaining its focus on a found-family community navigating both external threats and the strangeness of their changed world. Brown's collaborative fiction with Smith blends frontier-adventure tropes with superhero-style mutation narratives.