Cindy L. Rodriguez was a newspaper reporter for the Hartford Courant and a researcher for the Boston Globe before becoming a public school teacher. She is now a reading specialist at a Connecticut middle school. She is also a founder of the site Latinxs in Kid Lit, which has been celebrating books by/for/about Latinxs since 2013. She is the author of When Reason Breaks, a YA novel (2015), and “I’m a Survivor,” an essay in Life Inside My Mind: 31 Authors Share Their Personal Struggles (2018). She has also written the text for the middle grade novels Volleyball Ace (2020), Drill Team Determination (2021), and Gymnastics Payback (2021), which are all part of the Jake Maddox series.