Jocelyn McClurg

USA TODAY





Who: John Green, 37, author of The Fault in Our Stars

Why: He made it OK to cry, and laugh through the tears, about cancer. OK.

John Green gets kids. Teenagers, to be exact. His young-adult novel The Fault in Our Stars, an instant best seller when it was published in January 2012, hit the stratosphere in 2014.

The movie version – which earned $124.9 million and starred Shailene Woodley and Ansel Elgort as cancer-stricken teen lovers Hazel and Gus – propelled FIOS to No. 1 on USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list 15 times (including 11 consecutive weeks), the most of any book in 2014.

At BookCon in New York in June, nearly 2,000 young fans showed the love by screaming for their favorite author. As Nerdfighters everywhere know, Green (along with his brother, Hank) is a YouTube pioneer, too. Oh, and two more Green novels are coming to the big screen: Paper Towns (June 5, 2015) and Looking for Alaska (in development).

As for the burning question, when will there be a new John Green book? His publisher says there are "no hints from John about what's up next." Sorry, kids.