Until recently, Caldecott Medal–winning author-illustrator Brian Selznick had never written for young adults, nor written a full-fledged love story. That changed with* Run Away with Me* (Scholastic, 2025), a YA novel about a transformative summer romance between two teenage boys in 1980s Rome that is interwoven with love stories spanning centuries in the Eternal City. Selznick, known for the children’s books *The Invention of Hugo Cabret* and *Wonderstruck,* spoke with the American Library Association’s *How I Library* podcast about finding revelatory love, building on cultural history, and why books scare those in power. **Where did *Run Away with Me*’s setting and story come from?** My husband won a fellowship that brought us to Rome at the height of the pandemic, and we had the city to ourselves—the Trevi Fountain, the Pantheon, the Colosseum. I wanted to reflect that feeling of walking around an empty city and living among history, where beauty and ruin coexist.…