Shifa Saltagi Safadi: The Goal Is To Grow in Craft and Quality
In this interview, author Shifa Saltagi Safadi discusses the survival stories of her youth that helped inspire her new middle-grade novel, Sisters Alone.
Shifa Saltagi Safadi is the National Book Award-winning author of Kareem Between and several picture books, including The Gift of Eid. She has a bachelor’s degree in English literature, teaches ELA at a local middle school, and reviews Muslim books on her blog, Muslim Mommy Blog. Shifa was born in Syria and immigrated to the U.S. with her parents as a young girl. She lives near Chicago with her husband and four children. Follow her on Instagram.
In this interview, Shifa discusses the survival stories of her youth that helped inspire her new middle-grade novel, Sisters Alone, her advice for other writers, and more.
Name: Shifa Saltagi Safadi
Literary agent: Janine Le at Janine Le Literary Agency
Book title: Sisters Alone
Publisher: G.P. Putnam Sons/Penguin Random House
Release date: September 8, 2026
Genre/category: Middle-grade novel in verse
Previous titles: Kareem Between, the Amina Banana series, The Gift of Eid
Elevator pitch: Two sisters get stuck home alone in a blizzard and have to navigate their icy relationship, their grief, and the tumultuous dangerous events around them to survive.
What prompted you to write this book?
At first, I wanted to write a survival story. I love reading middle-grade stories like Hatchet and Alone with main characters who have to battle nature and find their inner-strength in the process. And we get a lot of blizzards in Chicagoland, so writing a story on all the scary things that could happen if a person was stuck in a snowstorm with no electricity, food, or shelter felt pretty easily imaginable to me.
The story developed into a sister story while I was revising my first draft. It felt both humorous and realistic to have sibling clashes be a reason for two sisters to be stuck home alone, and the title of Sisters Alone symbolizes the story’s inner theme. After all, by very nature, having a sister with you means you are not actually physically alone. But also, the crevices and cracks in a sibling relationship can cut so deep, like in Rama and Leena’s life after their mother’s death, that you can be with someone else in the same home and still feel utterly, absolutely alone. And I wanted readers to see the healing of a broken relationship, and how that healing can be the key to survival.
How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?
Writing Sisters Alone took me about two years from idea to its publishing date, but it went through a VAST number of changes during the writing and revision process.
At first, as I mention previously, it started in the first draft as a tale of one sister stuck home alone. But she felt too alone to me, and the emotional stakes were not as high. My scenes read to me like a list of survival moments rather than a convincing plot that would sweep readers away and leave them feeling a catharsis at the end. It took a lot of thinking and tinkering with my plot until I realized I needed another character on the page, and brought in the sister. And that was actually its own challenge!
Adding a point of view to the plot meant I had to rearrange the scenes, which affected the pacing and slowed down the story to the point where the survival moments happened almost midway in the book—way too late to deliver that exciting premise to the reader.
And so when my editor sent me my edit letters (three of them, each of which was quite lengthy and brilliantly detailed), one of the main things we worked on was fixing the pacing and plot issues to bring the survival scenes forward.
I went from a three-act structured plot to a five-act structure. I completely rethought the exposition of the book and delved deep into the characterization and voice to distinguish the two girls.
And in my last pass of the book, I focused on polishing the poetry and making it as vivid as possible.
Honestly, I think I rewrote the book so many times that the last version of the story looks utterly unrecognizable from the first, except maybe for the presence of snow!
Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?
Besides the fact that I was surprised my editor even picked this up in the raw form she saw it? Ha!
I think I was mainly surprised at how much harder the process of revision felt for me, even though I had already been through it before. Part of it was likely that writing about anxiety and intrusive thoughts triggered my own anxiety each time I approached the manuscript.
But it was also a learning moment for me: that each book has its own journey, even when you feel like you have figured it all out. And I truly am so grateful for this long process of revision and rewriting, because it taught me so much about craft, and especially voice in trying to distinguish my two points of view, and the story was greatly improved.
Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?
Writing Sisters Alone was a different process than my first book. A lot of my debut was based on my own experience navigating being Syrian and American, and so it felt like a natural emotional arc to write. And the football storyline flowed so easily too, due to both my own kid being a huge Bears fan, but also because a sports story has a natural plot sequence to it.
With Sisters Alone, I had to plot out a survival story, an experience I have thankfully never gone through. Furthermore, I needed to have two separate characters, each with their own emotional arc. And those two very different points of views had to flow side by side in one plot. It was not an easy thing to manage!
But in my efforts to figure things out, I realized that there was so much more to writing that I had not even considered in my debut Kareem Between. I challenged myself to dig deeper into craft and learned so much more about voice, character, plot, and poetry—and I hope that makes me a much stronger writer.
After all, the goal is to grow in craft and quality with each book I write.
What do you hope readers will get out of your book?
I hope the theme of sisterhood and love as being the key to survival stands out the most.
The world is so hard, full of so many struggles and difficult moments for all of us, anxiety about the future and grief about the past. I hope that readers know that they are never alone, that leaning on each other is the key to being able to survive another day.
If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?
Keep improving your craft. I know there is a lot of conflicting advice online all the time about platform, sales track, and fame—all the requirements supposedly needed to get a book deal.
But I truly believe that the main aspect of getting a deal is the book itself. Write a book that is high-quality writing, something meaningful, a page-turning story that you know no one will be able to put down, and make it the best craft you can manage. And then let go of the results.
Some authors write multiple books before they get published (me included), and I am so grateful that those first two middle-grades I wrote never got published (or even made it off my computer). Because I want to put only my best work out in the world!
Quality of writing might not achieve fame the first week the book is published, but it will gain a readership and a word-of-mouth reputation that will build and find readers that will fall in love. And that is all we can hope for as writers.
The power of good writing is that it inspires emotion that will bring hearts to life, and yes, we do so much work for that fleeting moment of beautiful feeling.
And it is absolutely worth it.
