Kaela Rivera is the multi-award-winning author of the Cece Rios series (HarperCollins Children’s, 2021–2024), and she brings her first horror novel to the Salt Lake Book Festival: The Hungry Forest (Bloomsbury Children’s, August 18, 2026). Ryan’s father left him rules. Never let anyone see you cry. Never let outsiders hear you speak Spanish. Never, ever go into the hungry forest. Since his father died, Ryan has held to every one of them — and his anger keeps landing on his younger brother, Teddy. Then both boys hear their father’s voice calling from the treeline, and Ryan goes in after it.

Rivera wrote the first draft in six days, and she illustrated this one herself — her first published artwork, drawn in part to give reluctant readers something to pull them from chapter to chapter. The scares are real, but the book is just as interested in grief, brotherhood, and the things boys get taught about being strong.

She grew up reading the folktales of her Mexican-American and British parents in the treetops and creeks of Tennessee’s Appalachian forests, and now writes from the mountains of Utah, where she also works as an editor. Come hear how a forest gets hungry, and what it takes to get home before sunrise.