I study how young adult literature is taught to preservice teachers at colleges and universities. As part of that endeavor, I look at how syllabi are put together. I first met this week’s guest contributor through her syllabus. Angela Insenga is an associate professor at the University of West Georgia and her syllabus was wonderful. She teaches YA literature by engaging students with books and popular culture. She was a presenter at the YA conference I hosted last summer and she does not disappoint. I know you will enjoy what Angela has to offer.  

                                                   Between the Bookends:  YA and Critical Collaboration
​I have a storied history of not owning the right tool for the job at hand, yet I always manage to figure out a way to get the job done.  No hammer?  Use a big seashell.  No decorative planter?  There’s that shiny red soup pot I never use.  No bookends?  I could use two planters, gifted to me by my aunt.  “Brinksmanship,” friends have said, clucking their tongues as I wield my “seashammer” with precision.  I see my endless substitution as persistent resourcefulness, not recklessness.  At present, those two planters sit behind me on top of my office bookcases. Between them is a long row of books “on deck.”  These are texts I need to reread; books I may want to teach after reading them on those holiday reading benders; books that I will teach soon; and those that are germane to current research.  But another way to describe this scene is to say that between the planters lies the most fulfilling aspect of the work I do as an English professor and teacher trainer:  my YA.  I may not always use the correct tool for less teacherly endeavors in my life, but I become more convinced with each passing year that advocating for YA by deploying it in learning spaces enables me to share the tool most apropos for the work my students have ahead of them.  Age and content appropriate literature leads them and their students towards more sophisticated literacy. Said sophistication translates into lifelong learning and negotiation with ideas, both academic and civic.  I sometimes reorganize this vital literature in purposeful ways for classroom use and share below a description of a new curricular strategy at work in my YA class.  

Typically, I practice Dr. Joan Kaywell’s concept of bridging to the classics, wherein an instructor or literacy coach uses a piece of YA to aid students as they broach a more difficult, “canonical” text not necessarily written for them.  In doing so, teachers can provide access to difficult language and syntax, The age-appropriate text may take up a similar concept or duplicate context or, importantly, may present an adolescent point of view in line with readers’ development.  YA complements the classic during bridging. The texts I sometimes use when bridging include M.T. Anderson’s Feed (2002) and George Orwell’s 1984 (1949).  I may, conversely, assign Ten Things I Hate About You (1999) to help students experience The Taming of the Shrew’s storyline in a current cultural context and to foreground the fact that two “new adult” women at the center of the play wrestle with narrow paternalistic social codes much like the teens in the film.  I likewise discuss pairing with my YA students, again identifying the technique before asking them to read texts with similar central themes.  Here, I may assign “The Most Dangerous Game” (1924) by Richard Connell or Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” (1948) alongside the first book of Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games (2008) trilogy.  Defining these well-known strategies for grouping literature in the classroom and then reading texts placed into these configurations provides my teachers in training with templates for planning along with experience of discussing the works at the collegiate level before also practicing distillation for secondary students.  

​The Common Core standards in English and Language Arts, adopted in my state in 2012, presented myriad challenges for educators and teacher trainers alike.  One significant benefit of this body of competencies, however, is its inclusion of standards that mandate reading of literary and informational texts.  The overt presence of the latter meant new curricular design in schools where classic literature dominated syllabi.  And new curricula often meant new texts from numerous genres that speak to student experience.  Additionally, the increase in the number of standards that require students to learn and demonstrate analytical rigor in critical thinking necessitated my institution of more strategy-based teaching to help student teachers enrich student abilities. To this end, I return to bookends as a structuring device for effectively teaching critical thinking while reading YA--thus, these are metaphorical, not the literal planters serving as bookends in my office. In the midst of a wealth of high-quality YA texts and in the time of Common Core and resultant curricular revision, I lit upon bookending as a concept that would allow me to delineate a space framed by two texts, each on an opposite side of a spectrum.  I could, I reasoned, call that spectrum a historical epoch; a series of cultural references; a literary period; stages of life; the development of slang words; or label it with an evolving personal or political issue, depending upon the text choices or particular class goals.  And bookending depends on several precepts.  Reading and then discussing the text at each end of the spectrum is an imperative when bookending.  But equally important is the teacherly work of creating the conditions under which students can collaborate as we encourage their thinking about the space between the two bookends.  In this space, a teacher’s responsibility is to give form to the critical conversations about issues arising from the texts. In this space we may find confrontation and can stand on common ground.  In this space we agree to contribute ideas, ranging from purely experiential to academic, depending on the situation at hand.  We find that we, like the texts, work best when in dialog with another, when we are in the process of asking and answering open-ended questions.  And because YA speaks to the profound and the mundane via adolescent experience, we can spend more time doing the work required for deep reading and critical thinking instead of focusing solely on ensuring comprehension.   

I introduced “bookending” to my YA students last night with a good bit of help from a critical collaborator and kindred spirit, Ms. Stephanie Jones, a scholar now working at the University of Georgia.  I met her at last year’s Young Adult Literature Conference at LSU and almost instantly knew we had to work together.  My class began their study of Randy DuBurke’s and Greg Neri’s graphic novel Yummy: The Last Days of a Southside Shorty (2010) and will continue to discuss it in tandem with the second text in this pair, Jason Reynolds’s and Brendan Kiely’s galvanizing All American Boys (2015).  Stephanie gave me the gift of Yummy when she referenced it in her presentation last year, so her presence was vital last night.  Both of these books give voice to African American teen males’ brutal encounters with callous adults in positions of authority.  Both illustrate the complicated social, economic, and cultural assumptions entrenched in the minds of those who experience and witness violence. Robert Sandifer, nicknamed Yummy because of his love for cookies, was a real 11 year-old boy from Chicago who finally found acceptance and, later, acclaim in the Black Disciples Nation because of the violence he perpetrated on the streets. The text focuses largely on a pictorial representation of the  “boy hunt” that occurred over the course of three days in 1994 after one of Yummy’s bullets missed its intended target and struck 14 year-old Shavon Dean, killing her as she walked home while eating a bag of Fritos. Yummy’s own gang murdered him because they feared that his youth would be easy for law officers to exploit and that he would inform on them.  Ironically, Yummy’s age is what made him and other shorties attractive to gang leaders, since at that time Chicagoan minor offenders were sent to juvenile hall for any crime and released when 21, often untrained and unprepared for anything but criminal activity.  When this tangle of circumstance is teased out, we see a tale of two children lost in a system that inscribes them, a system in the process of wringing blood from bone and flesh in order to turn people into images that serve as reminders.  Shavon is forever innocence lost, an angel gone too soon; Yummy is a cautionary tale, or as my student Morgan solemnly said, he’s “only a lesson.” With this text comes a responsibility to discuss historical, psychosocial, and economic systems in which residents of Yummy’s ‘hood are embedded.  Ms. Jones’s fantastic work on the legacy of racial trauma in America provided us with a springboard into discussion about the ways in which Yummy was deeply affected by his place and time, how he was the product of a very long equation that never quite added up. 

​Stephanie’s query, “What are the events that created a Yummy in Chicago?” and another student’s question, “What about all of the Yummies to come?”, resonated deeply with me last night.  In these questions and the resulting dialog, the class navigated the space between the bookends, even thinking back to before Yummy, back to, say, A Raisin in the Sun’s insidious residential zoning and the submerged threats politely delivered to the Youngers in an effort to “keep them in their place.”  Their “place” is Yummy’s, after all, and they have worked and paid dearly to leave it behind.  During her time with us last night, Stephanie also asked my students to examine original examples of “The Family Circus” cartoons, an allusion that readers of All American Boys will remember and my own students will encounter this coming week.  She then asked us draw “Yummy’s Family Circus,” neatly connecting both texts’ central theme of displacement and isolation because of protracted social circumstance.  We then had an opportunity to display our work for each other.  This tactile and visual activity drew us into critical discussion of Yummy’s motivations and prepared us for Rashad’s use of “The Family Circus” as an ironic artistic touchstone. 
 
I found myself drawn to my student Shelby’s drawing of Yummy’s world.  In her iteration, she wrote the word “AGENCY” in neat block letters.  And, as if the circle in which Bil Keane drew his world reminded her not of the folksy comic strip but of a road sign, she drew a black, diagonal line across it, striking out the word she had so carefully written. This image manifested Robert Yummy Sandifer’s life. He had no agency when he accepted a gun as a present from a Black Disciple, saying that he’d never gotten a gift before.  He had no agency when he used that gun in an attempt to make a name for himself in his gang of loving “brothers.”  His parents, both in constant trouble with the law, also did not possess a great deal of agency, once we investigate their own troubled backgrounds.  And Yummy’s grandmother, who took care of up to 20 grandchildren, also had little to no agency outside of her threadbare home.  And without a path toward agency--that seemingly abstract “thing” granted to those with privilege and rarely earnable if you have no status--we will encounter another story like Yummy’s, Tamir’s, Trayvon’s, Bland’s, or even Shepherd’s, Clementi’s, or Hawkins’s.  Stephanie’s structured activities began opening us up to our own assumptions and experiences as well as to the vast legacy of cultural trauma the produced one 11 year-old boy’s violence and anger.  We thus populated the space between the bookends with ideas large and small, visceral and expository.  Our reading of All American Boys will continue to inform our discussion of the same issues we found in Yummy.  Though two decades separate the texts’ tales, the similarities between them and the tunekt cultural occurrences surrounding them demand our passionate attention. 

​My YA students will bookend again in April when we study The Catcher in the Rye (1951) and The Bell Jar (1963).  I imagine our discussions will center on expectations placed on young men and women at the beginning of the Cold War.  Holden Caulfield and Esther Greenwood are literary kin, sharing separate journeys that put them in direct opposition to social mores in post-World War II America. In the space between these two novels, then, we will study the psyches that their shared socialization process produces.  We will do this, I hope, to problematize and situate “deviant” behavior, to diagnose our protagonists, and to understand their utter desperation in a decade that gave us the suburbs, the classic American Dream, “juvenile delinquency,” the Corvette, the execution of the Rosenbergs, and the McCarthy trials.  This sort of study, interdisciplinary by necessity, will take us into informational and media texts that will refine our understanding of the era and its designs on adolescents in--and out of--these novels. And, again, in the process we will learn how to meet governing agencies’ standards while creating the sort of engagement that results from reading age-appropriate literature and developing deeper reading and writing skills.

​Putting texts into dialog and using pedagogical strategies to illustrate the interplay between them, inviting collaborators to the table to work alongside us in that space, and returning to the bookends that delineate a critical frame of reference have offered me exciting new teaching prospects in recent months.  I am so keen on the idea of bookending that I’ve even devised my summer YA course’s reading list with it in mind.  I wonder what you are thinking as you read through my ideas and consider the YA texts I have chosen.  What texts do you bookend in your classes, YA or otherwise? What are your suggestions for additions? Maybe there are classroom strategies you use to foment discussion in the space between bookended texts?  In the coming months of study and practice, I hope to find that bookending, like YA, is an entirely appropriate tool for the important work at hand. There should be no “seashammers,” red soup pots as planters, or planters serving as bookends in one’s teaching toolbox, right?  

Thanks Angela. Angela can be contacted at ainsenga@westga.edu.

If you are in the Las Vegas area, please consider joining us at our March 5th event described in the flier below.

I had read excerpts from Nathan McCall’s (1994) powerful book Makes Me Wanna Holler in an earlier more protected life. I had taken an in-service class as a teacher that introduced me to McCall and I thought that I was doing what I could to introduce my predominately white middle class students to multicultural literature. In retrospect I did not find enough ways to effectively spread the conversation about diversity. The study of secondary discourse communities and the difficulties they have of being heard in the primary discourse, especially as it manifest itself in schools, has caused me to reevaluate what I consider successful about my own teaching career. 

I read all of McCall’s book on a trip to New York City in 2003 with my teenage daughter. She had never been to New York before and was full of uneasy anticipation. She was anxious to see a Broadway play and was nervous, as I found out later, of viewing ground zero of the tragedy of 9/11. I was full of some of the same uneasy anticipation of viewing the absence of the World Trade Center as well. I had been to the top floor of one building four years before the event with one son and stood at the base with another son just six weeks before the attack. I am not much of a poet, but I attempted to capture the memories I experienced with my children in this poem.

                                                                A Gesture to Memories With Children
           
In August of 1997 I stood at the top of the world with one son by my side.
 We looked down, taking the time to look in each direction; measuring the distance, collecting the landmarks.
 
In August of 2001 I stood at the bottom of the world with a second son by my side.
 We looked up, trying to bend backwards to take in its height; avoiding the dizzy uneasiness of that balancing act.
 
On September 11, 2001 I drove to work as in the early dawn of a Utah mountain morning as NPR guided my way.
 As a glimmer of sun crept over the Quirrh mountains, breaking news interrupted my calm.
 An airplane had collided into a tower of the World Trade Center, details unknown.
 
Which one was it?
 
                                  The one with the observation deck where I looked down with one son.
 
                                  The one where I stood at the base and looked up with another.
 
During the day the buildings collapsed and the world changed.
 
On September 20, 2003 I stood with a daughter at the edge of the largest hole in America.
 We gazed through chain linked fencing to watch the tiny trucks continue to excavate, sifting for meaning in the aftermath of death and hate.
 
Horizontal fencing with memorial plaques of lament, grief, and hate replaced the vertical expanse of glass and concrete.

As I viewed the site of this horrendous action I was struck by how it has become a symbol, at least for me, of race and culture hate. The lack of tolerance of anyone or any group in the world, let alone the need for acceptance, is terrifying to me.
 
I carried McCall’s book with me through the Atlanta airport, La Guardia airport, the New York subway, the metro buses, Washington Square Park, and a variety of other places hoping that some one would engage me in conversation. No one did. On the plane ride home I had a small, pleasant conversation with an African American woman just after I finished reading and closed the book. We talked about New York and Atlanta with anonymous references.  I was a displaced Westerner voluntarily selecting Georgia as place to do graduate work in Language Education. In part, because I hoped I would have to confront my own tenuous relationship with race and culture, an attempt to test the limits of my own bigotry and ignorance.

In the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art I sat across from several paintings by Picasso and read McCall’s book. Lead by a portrait of Gertrude Stein, their distorted images watched me as McCall’s narrative unfold. I was reminded that one day, after repeatedly looking at Picasso’s Guernica, I felt like the shattered and ruptured images of tragedy in the painting made sense. I was no closer to understanding or comprehending the violence of hate and war, but I felt like I could begin to understand the pain and the astonishment of the atrocities. While I read McCall’s troubled musing of what it means to be a Black male in the United States the images and experiences are as surreal to me as a Picasso painting. The images are identifiable but distanced and shaded in black, altering the lens of whiteness through which I will always see the world. McCall and I share the same birth year and reading his experiences year by year I am forced to recognize that while he had a range of choices from which to choose, that range was never remotely as large and as free as the range of choices that I had along the way. 

McCall paints verbal stories that I have no desire to personally experience. I am content with the vicarious experience of misogynistic behavior, street violence, prison, and rejection due to skin tone. I have no desire to pull the trigger of a gun. I believe him. I feel a measure of his pain and sense a different pain of my own, the pain of not knowing what to do or where to begin. While McCall, as a Black man, says that all of these experiences make him wanna holler, he has retrained and controlled the scream and released a whisper. The whisper penetrates and makes its presence felt. Reading his experience makes me, as a white man, wanna shut up, I wonder if I can whisper back a response that can find mutual ground for growth. Now, in the wake of Treyvon Martin, Freguson, MO, and the Black Lives Matter movement can't I do a bit more than whisper?

What does this post have to do with YA literature? It is Black History Month and I don't want to whisper or shut up. This blog need to celebrate the rich legacy of African American Authors. I want to offer a point power that I used to guide a discussion about including African American Authors in classrooms last year during Black History Month.  We can start with YA authors I highlighted--Jacqueline Woodson, Coe Booth, Kekla Magoon, Kwame Alexander, Sharon Draper,  Sharon Flake, Jason Reynolds, Christopher Paul Curtis, and Walter Dean Myers. Of course, there are many more. Who are you discussing this month? Don't stop with these; adolescents can read adult texts as well. I included--Malcolm X, Nathan McCall, Eldridge Cleaver, Shirley Chisholm, Colin Powell, and Barack Obama. Feel free to use and adapt the power point in any manner that suits your needs. It is amazing to me how much I should add to even the discussion of these YA authors after a single year. 

This week’s guest contributor is Dr. Sophia Sarigianides. For the past few years, she has been pushing me to think deeply about how I teach and research Young Adult Literature. She is always thought provoking. Even when I don’t agree with her, I find that I keep thinking about what she has to say. She is exactly the kind of academic and teacher who encourages engagement with new ideas. As a result, she is a perfect candidate for a keynote speech at almost any YA conference. Indeed, she will be one of the academic keynotes at the 2016 Gayle A. Zeiter Young Adult and Children’s Literature Conference this June. See more about keynote speakers here and watch for more details soon about registration at the Zeiter Center website. If you are in or near Las Vegas we have a warm-up event on March 5, 2016 with some more great writers and academics. Okay, enough promotional chat. Take it away Sophia.

Examining Youth and Sexuality in YA Literature
I didn’t expect my interest in studying representations of adolescence in young adult literature to lead me to focus on youth and sexuality, but it did. My thinking about young people and our ideas and expectations of them hasn’t been the same since.

 When asked to teach my first YA course as a doctoral student, I felt intimidated. The graduate program drew teacher candidates with strong literary preparation and I wanted to ensure that their treatment of YAL felt rigorous to them, that they felt challenged by the course.  To push myself and my students, I opened a copy of Lesko’s Act Your Age! A cultural construct of adolescence that had been sitting on my shelf for years. I had no idea whether it even made sense to think about Lesko’s ideas about adolescence in a YA class, but something propelled me to try anyway.

That something was likely the fact that I felt implicated by Lesko’s exposure of how most of us think about adolescence through a range of stereotypes: reckless, overly-emotional, irresponsible, immature. I loved the middle and high school students I had taught in California, but I thought of them through these “confident characterizations” of young people that ultimately demeaned them as people.

Slowly, I revised my YA course for English teachers to foreground the ways that a body of writing that names its readership—“young adults”—represents adolescence. For every YA book read in our class, we think about the key question, How do YA texts represent adolescence/ts? Joined by like-minded colleagues, Robert Petrone and Mark Lewis, the three of us coined a name for this approach to studying literary texts: the youth lens. You can read more about it and how to use it in some of the writing we have done together: in “The Youth Lens: Analyzing Adolescents/ce in Literary Texts”; “How Re-thinking Adolescence Helps Re-imagine the Teaching of English” (and the special issue of English Journal in which you can find this and other articles focused on adolescence); and in the upcoming Winter 2016 issue of The ALAN Review “Acting Adolescent? Critical Examinations of the Youth-Adult Binary in Feed and Looking for Alaska.”

After getting a chance to think more about how this approach to studying YAL affected pre-service teachers, who sometimes found it risky, I wanted to study how experienced, in-service teachers working in a poor, predominantly black and Latino school might react. That’s where the focus on sex came up.
 
I’d been teaching Francesca Lia Block’s (1989) Weetzie Bat for years in my YA course, and pre-service students often worried about the depiction of sexual young people, cohabitating, and choosing to parent. I actually loved focusing on these depictions to help us notice our assumptions about youth. So I used this text in my study with experienced teachers, too, thinking that these depictions might seem less risky to them. I can be very naïve. Working with these smart, dedicated teachers, listening to them worry about what such a depiction might seemingly endorse for their students really, really taught me a lot that had been staring me in the face for years: most of us hold to these expectations of young people as sexually innocent and it affects our curriculum and certainly our text selections as well as the ways we think about and treat youth in our classes. I talk more about these assumptions and their repercussions here and if anyone has trouble accessing these pieces, contact me directly.

Fascinated by these questions, I thought I would investigate them further with an elective course I taught last year called Theory and the YA Novel. In this course, I felt more liberty in selecting texts without having to worry as much about challenges to using them in classrooms, but to pursue this question of how sexuality is depicted in texts aimed for youth. So, for the first time, I read Margo Lanagan’s Tender Morsels. This fantastic and brutal book, published in Australia without the “YA” label but in the U.S. with the YA label to critical acclaim, allows a gripping exploration of youth and sexuality within and beyond the realms of reality. I highly recommend it.

One of the students in that course who also happens to be an English Education major decided to make these questions the focus of her year-long senior honors research and writing project. I want to close off this post with a discussion of her work. Amber Robert (who was tickled to hear that I was featuring her work in my posting) wanted to explore the question of how adolescent female sexuality was depicted in texts featuring youth. Her project ended up focusing on three texts: Virginia Euwer Wolff’s Make Lemonade; the comedy film Easy A; and Emily Danforth’s ​The Miseducation of Cameron Post.

Amber’s project brought together a YA text I consider a classic (Make Lemonade); a very popular film (Easy A); and a book that was new to me, an award-winning text focused on LGBTQ themes (Cameron Post). I love what Amber did with her paper and how much I learned about depictions of female sexuality in texts featuring youth from our year-long conversations. For Amber, these texts grew progressively more transgressive in the way they featured young women as sexual. 
​
In Wolff’s fantastic novel, we are helped to revise our ideas of young mothers by accompanying LaVaughn on her change of heart about Jolly as she helps her take care of her two kids. But in the end, in order for LaVaughn’s mom to change her mind—and perhaps some of us to change ours about Jolly?—Jolly has to heroically save her child from choking. It’s tough to focus on teen pregnancy in YAL without judging the youth, especially the young women (as Kokkola compellingly shows us in her book focused on this issue in YAL). In other words, as much as I love this novel and teach it regularly—especially since Wolff purposely left out racial references to allow readers to notice when we map them onto the women in this text (something like Toni Morrison in her only short story “Recitatif”)—the book foregrounds the difficulties that accompany female teen sexuality through pregnancy. 

​I have seen Easy A_ many, many times and think it’s enormously hilarious and entertaining. In Amber’s project, though, we noticed that though Emma Stone’s character takes on the slut label in clothing and feigned behavior in a resistant move pushing back against how her social community judges her (much like the Hester Prynne whose story she is responding to from English class), she’s punished for it by her judgmental peers, and ultimately remains a virgin until the last frame of the movie. In other words, her transgressions are contained within the viewer’s hoped-for innocence for her, and the film isn’t as transgressive as it might seem. One has to wonder, too, what would happen if Emma Stone’s character were black or Latina. Would the slut performance remain as comical and playful, or do social views of non-white female adolescence differ greatly with regard to sexuality as many scholars argue?

It was the book that Amber got me to read for the first time, Danforth’s The Miseducation of Cameron Post, where the most transgressive depiction of female adolescent sexuality could be seen, and this in a book featuring a white lesbian protagonist. Highly unusual for a text featuring adolescents, Danforth’s text depicts Cameron falling in love, enjoying sex, having multiple partners without punishment, and, though she’s depicted as suffering as a result of her sexuality, she transcends this social judgment by finding a community of peers—and a likely adult—who support her. Given dominant views of youths’ sexuality, texts like Danforth’s offer young people a fresh, surprising, supportive narrative to counter the worry and anxiety that prevails in most YA texts featuring sexual youth.

So why does all this matter?
 
Following this “parlour conversation” about youth sexuality and how it’s represented in YAL primarily aimed at a youth audience is important. Youth are sexual. We were; they are. There’s no question about this. Yet, most of the literature aimed at youth punishes characters for their sexuality (see Kokkola’s book mentioned earlier). Imagine what these messages do for young readers without recourse to other views about sexuality. Imagine what it does to youth for whom a sexually innocent adolescence is unavailable. It matters greatly for us to think about these questions as we make text selections and recommendations for teachers, for young people, and for the many adults also reading YAL. 

Thanks Sophia.

Click below for a flier about our March 5th conference

I started the day with a great meeting with Robert Jones, the Coordinator, Library Services, for Clark County School District. It was a great meeting. Really, who doesn’t want to start the day talking about books, authors, library access for kids, professional development that works, and creating a wish list of who we might like to visit Las Vegas to visit with librarians, teachers, preservice teachers, and students at CCSD and UNLV.

Okay, here are some of the names that came up on the WISH list (remember a wish list, but if anyone out there knows about any rich donors give me a call.):

Jacqueline Woodson, Gordan Korman, Matt de la Peña, Kate DiCamillo, and Sharon Draper.
_
No doubt, this is a great list, but as far as I know, none of these authors are sneaking into Las Vegas soon. Nevertheless, if you fine people are sneaking into town for some fun and sun in sin city, we can help make your trip meaningful for students and the adults who work with them.

​The conversation drifted a bit to the remarkable nature of kids who make a difference. Ten days ago, I didn’t know the name Marley Emerson Dias. Many of you still don’t know the name, but you are starting to know about the hashtag #1000BlackGirlBooks. I want to firmly suggest that you should know Marley’s name. Names matter. They make us individuals and they force people to see us as well as the movements, the ideas, and the accomplishments that come from our efforts. In addition, we should not ignore Marley’s friends Briana and Amina. They share a blog. Marley writes about pop culture and, apparently starts cultural movements as a sideline. Briana channels science topics and writes about animals and plans to be a Veterinarian. Amina claims to be the “funky fashion” reporter for the group, but my heart soared when she stated that she already reading Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred. These are the educational stories we need in the media. Smart African-American girls who don’t need to ask permission to make an impact. Thank you. 

I like to plan ahead. So, I am working on plan now to figure out how to get Marley to the Gayle A. Zeiter Young Adult and Children’s Literature Conference at UNLV in 2017 as one of the academic keynotes. Heaven knows, I let myself speak as an academic and I haven’t begun to make the impact on the reading lives of adolescents that she has made in the last few weeks. I am not the only one to blog about her impact. You can read about her here in the Choice Words Blog in a posting by Natasha Ivery and in a blog post here by an emerging author, Jodi Baker. In addition, Marley has been mentioned by Nikki Grimes, Rita Williams-Garcia, Sharon Flake, Jacqueline Woodson, and Laurie Halse Anderson. I am sure there are many authors who recognize the important contribution that Marley is making. She was on ELLEN on 2/2/2016. Thanks Marley for helping me think more proactively about #1000BlackGirlBooks in the hands of adolescent during Black History Month. You go girl! Isn't there an author out there who want to escort Marley to the UNLV Young Adult and Children's Literature Conference in June of 2017! I am taking applications.

Authors are coming to Las Vegas!
We have an upcoming event at UNLV. On March 5th we will host:
 Bill Konigsberg, Tom Leveen, James Blasingame, and Denise Dávila.
Register at: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/gayle-a-zeiter-center-young-adult-and-childrens-literature-seminar-registration-20707040315

I have been hinting about this event for weeks. I have admired the work of Bill Konigsberg for some time.  I loved Openly Straight and eagerly awaited The Porcupine of Truth. Along with many others I was thrilled that Bill recently received the Stonewall Book Award for the second book. You just have to love a guy who mixes his passion for story telling with his desire to help struggling youth. You all know these kids, kids who are unnecessarily alienated. Bill spent a good portion of 2015 touring and visiting schools as part of the Trevor Project. 

​I was introduced to Tom Leveen by reading his fantastic novel, Sick. I will admit it in public, I am a fan of The Walking Dead on AMC and through the graphic novel series. Nevertheless, if your only introduction to Zombie culture is through this The Walking Dead, World War Z, or Warm Bodies, you are missing one of the great contributions to the Zombie genre. Check out Leveen’s Sick. You won’t regret it and you might just find yourself chuckling a bit about the end of the world. Tom Leveen was recently a TEDX speaker at ChandlerPublicLibrary. Over the last ten years, Tom has written 7 novels with another one coming in 2017. You don’t want to miss his talk. It has plenty to offer and your students will find another author to love.

Jim Blasingame is one of the most generous people I know. He is a dedicated teacher. He was Arizona State University’s professor of the year in 2008, he has been known to recite cowboy poetry—maybe we can get him to recite at least one while he is here. He is also the author of many publications—book reviews, articles, and academic texts. What I briefly want to highlight here is Books that Don’t Bore ‘Em. Go ahead, buy a copy. It will be the perfect addition to your professional development library. Our last, but by no means the least, addition to the group is Densie Dávila. I am thrilled that Denise joined the faculty at UNLV this January. I have admired Denise’s work since our editorial team with The ALAN Review accepted her first publication. As a graduate student at the Ohio State University, Denise submitted an article to us that we readily accepted. The full text of Not So Innocent: Book Trailers as Promotional Text and Anticipatory Stories can be found here. It is not a surprise to me or to anybody that has worked with her that she is one of the rising academic stars in the field of Children’s literature. Her most recent publication was in Research in the Teaching of English and can be found here. She provides an articulate discussion on the need “to cultivate religiously pluralist thinkers” as we explore the need and uses of diverse books in the classroom. Don’t take my word for the quality of her work. You can start reading with the links that are provided and you can come hear her speak at UNLV on March 5, 2016.

If you live in or near Las Vegas, plan to join us for these wonderful keynotes speakers. In addition, we will have a few breakout sessions for librarians, teachers, and parents. As part of the day, we will also have a panel discussion with Jim, Denise, and myself about the issues, challenges, and opportunities that the We Need Diverse Campaign has brought to our attention. Clearly, those of you who don't live in Las Vegas need to plan a trip so that you are here on March 5, 2016.