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ALAN Workshop 2022 Excitement: Tips for Newcomers by Dr. Gretchen Rumohr

11/16/2022

Well, everyone! Today is the day! NCTE2022 is finally happening–and that also means that YA lovers will gather for the ALAN Postconvention Workshop.

When I first started going to NCTE, people would tell me to attend ALAN. I would roll my eyes. “Me? With my busy schedule? I can’t take two more days for travel.” As time went on, though, I heard more and more about this incredible workshop–that I’d be able to meet authors, listen to thought-provoking keynotes and panels, and receive the HUGE MAGIC BOX OF BOOKS.

I have to say, the virtual ALAN workshops were productive and interesting–especially since I was able to bake pies while watching panels. But this year, I am eager to reconnect face-to-face with colleagues, open that book box in that ballroom, and learn even more about rising YA authors and their stories.

For some of you new to the workshop, the ALAN community has advice! Here are some pointers from the Facebook ALAN group. And if you aren’t registered for the workshop this year, plan on attending in Columbus, Ohio for 2023!

Get there early, as Neil Klein advises. There will be many other attendees eager to receive their programs, open their boxes, and stake out a spot in the ballroom.

Be prepared to pack your books, or to ship your books home. Now, there’s a bit of debate about this–some prefer to ship books media mail (like me), some prefer to ship books priority, and others pack an extra suitcase for a carry-on. In case you are wondering, there will be shipping options close to the workshop.

Get ready to receive some books from authors you know well and some authors you may not be familiar with. This will be true for everyone–and everyone’s boxes will be different. Daria Lynn breaks it down for us: “You won't get everything you hope for and it may not all be for the grade level you work with. Please be gracious. Each publishing company DONATES those books but not every company can give 500 of every book. Plus, part of the fun is trading with other people.” #ALAN22Trades is one way that you can trade with others.

Be sure to attend the Sunday evening reception (5-7:30 at the Hilton) and be social. You’ll be able to meet other ALAN attendees, play YA trivia, and meet your favorite authors. Jordan Sonnenblick reminds us: “Please don’t be shy. The authors WANT to meet you.” Speaking as a true introvert, these events can seem overwhelming at times–however, I have found that the excitement of meeting ALAN authors makes for a rather friendly reception atmosphere. Make a point to be there and introduce yourself to a few other people. You’ll see them next year, and the year after that, and the year after that. This workshop is where some lasting friendships are made. Do your best to be social! You won’t regret it.

Dress for comfort. ALAN is about relaxing, connecting with others, and going wild about all of these new YA books. It’s unnecessary to dress formally in this atmosphere. Bring those jeans and yoga pants! The conference room may be cold, so bring a sweater.

As I write this post, I am frantically checking my flight updates, crossing my fingers that this Midwest snowstorm holds off just two more hours so I can get on that plane. See you all in Anaheim for NCTE22 and ALAN22!

Photo credit to Noah Schaffer–who will be dearly missed at this year’s workshop!

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The Role of Literacy Within YA Texts by Dr. Brady L. Nash

11/9/2022

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Continuing the conversation begun by Michelle Falter a few weeks ago, we welcome Brady L. Nash to the blog today to consider how characters' own literacies should be considered when we study YA texts.

Dr. Nash is an Assistant Professor of English Language Arts at Miami University (Ohio) and a former secondary English teacher. In his teaching and research, he focuses on the preparation of future teachers through critical approaches to ELA curriculum and instruction.

The Role of Literacy Within YA Texts by Dr. Brady L. Nash

Young adult literature is one of the few genres of literature in which the genre is explicitly defined by the age of the characters and the anticipated readers (For more, see Michelle Falter’s recent post on this website exploring the definition of YA). This genre construction creates a rhetorical situation in which adult writers compose worlds for youth with a mind to how young people - specifically - make meaning with the text and with characters. Each young adult text represents and contributes to an imagined version of how the world does or could work.

Within the worlds, lives, and activities of characters depicted in YA, there is a wealth of literacy practices on display. Characters read novels in their English classes, blog in their freetime, write in diaries and writer’s notebooks, compose songs, lyrics, videos, watch TV, read poetry. They do all of the literate things that people in the world do. This raises the question for teachers as to how YA texts represent literacy for students, and how YA texts teach students something about the way literacy operates in the world.

Below, I consider several texts in which the literacy practices of the characters play an important role in their lives and in the stories told within the texts. Considering the role of literacy within YA texts could be something for teachers to consider as they choose which books to recommend to students or as they help students pick books that may connect to their own literacy practices. This topic could also be one that teachers invite students to explore, analyze, or consider as part of larger class discussions, projects, or activities.

Gabi, a Girl in Pieces by Isabel Quintero is a novel told through the protaganist’s (Gabi) diary entries. In this sense, every word on the page functions as a showcase and extension of her literacy practices. Gabi takes creative writing courses, reads and writes poetry, mediates her life experiences through her personal writing, and dreams of attending The University of California Berkeley as an English major. Gabi also navigates her experience as a Mexican American within a culture of literature that has not traditionally celebrated writing from people who look like her and challenges related to others’ perceptions about her weight. Each of these experiences are told to us through writing (writing that exists both in the world of the novel and the world we live in). Writing is not only the medium for the novel, but also much of its content, as we consider how Gabi uses her writing both in and outside of school to make sense of herself and of the world.

On the Come Up, the highly anticipated follow-up to Angie Thomas’s heralded young adult novel, The Hate U Give, follows Bri, a teenage rapper living in the aftermath of her father’s murder and her mother’s recovery from addiction. Like Starr in The Hate U Give, Bri attends an elite, predominantly white high school; after being targeted and assaulted by security guards at school, Bri writes a song about the incident that goes viral, bringing her more attention as a lyricist, rapper, and activist than she had bargained for, with students at the school, neighborhood gangs, and the media all taking notice and reacting. Although much could be said about the ins and outs of the story, the role occupied by Bri’s writing and music production highlights the powerful impact of words and art to spark action - and re-action.

Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell follow’s Cath’s life as a first year student at The University of Nebraska, with a particular focus on her experiences as a writer of fan fiction stories, many of them erotic, constructed in the world of the Simon Snow book series, loosely based on Harry Potter. The plot is filled with family and social dillemas, and twists and turns related to both. Central conflicts related to Cath’s writing life include the perceived validity of fan fiction in comparison to traditional or normative writing (presuming we don’t count the likes of classic remixes such as Paradise Lost or Hamlet as fan fiction) and the social experiences of Cath as she navigates a literacy practice that, though it brings joy to millions of readers and is deeply important to her, goes largely unrecognized in her life.

Rani Patel in Full Effect by Sonia Patel focuses on the life of Rani Patel, an up and coming battle rapper who faces both family and political struggles as her Moloka'i community in Hawaii battles for water rights in the face of corporate developments. Rani’s Gujrati heritage and family culture leave her feeling a bit stuck in-between worlds, not quite at home with the values and experiences of either her family or her peers. To complicate matters further, she is grappling with surfacing memories of abuse from childhood. In the swirling midst of these problems, Rani’s engagement with poetry and rap music - as a listener/reader/writer, and eventually, her own performances, serve as powerful forces for her as she deals with this array of personal and political challenges, helping her to develop a sense of self in a world that has been anything but inviting of her.

In each of these novels, writing, reading, and varied forms of multimodal literacy play important roles in the lives of the characters and the progression of the plots. They each showcase a possibility for literate engagement outside of the narrow confines of school walls, standardized tests, or the next grade. They showcase the intimacy of literacy to our lives and just might serve as possible models of ways of being literate in the world.

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Transgender Awareness Week: Mourning, Empathy…and Maybe Even Some Joy by Dr. Sam Morris

11/2/2022

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We welcome Sam Morris to YA Wednesday today! Thank you, Sam, for helping us to understand how to incorporate transphobia awareness into our teaching of YA Literature.

Dr. Morris is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of South Carolina Beaufort. She is also the program coordinator for the B.A in English, with Secondary ELA Licensure. Her current research focus is the role that YA can play in encouraging adolescent empowerment and agency.

Transgender Awareness Week: Mourning, Empathy…and Maybe Even Some Joy by Dr. Sam Morris

This year, the week of November 13th-19th is Transgender Awareness Week. November 20th is also the annual Transgender Day of Remembrance, a day to honor and to mourn those who have lost their lives due to anti-transgender violence. As a trans woman, I must admit that—in this current social and political climate—I’d like to be a little less visible.

I discovered that I was trans later in life. Ironically, I may never have discovered this truth about myself had it not been for a certain YA author’s remarks during the summer of 2020. As I move forward in a world that grows stranger and more hostile every day in a body that grows finally more familiar and comfortable every day, I realize that I am the only trans person that many of my colleagues and students know.

Although that reality is rapidly changing! According to the UCLA Williams Institute, there are 1.6 million folks over the age of thirteen who identify as transgender in the United States; one in five are adolescents between the ages of thirteen and seventeen. When I think about Transgender Awareness Week, I think about the joy that results in finding out who you are, and I think about how important empathy is in all of our lives. In The Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick provides several axioms that she argues are central to understanding queerness; the first of those axioms is, “People are different from each other” (22). If you are happy with the sex that you were assigned at birth, there is no requirement for the person next to you to be similarly happy. But that’s only one piece of what it means to be trans.

What does it mean, then, to be trans? As C.N. Lester puts it in Trans Like Me, “It seems to have far less to do with gender than it does with broader issues of empathy and humility, and a willingness to understand that we are each the experts on our own lives” (37). When we truly understand Sedgwick’s first axiom, we begin to see the pain and suffering from which many youths suffer because of the rigidity of a social system that is more arbitrary than perhaps many would care to admit. Instead of asking ourselves how many trans children, adolescents, and adults are out there, I think we should be asking how many more trans folks are out there? How many people continue to hide who they are or are simply never able to make that discovery? Fighting transphobia is something that we must do, and we fight transphobia the same way that we fight racism, xenophobia, religous persecution, and homophobia: knowledge and action. Censorship has become one of the key themes of 2022. While others seek to take books out of the hands of adolescents, here are some books that I suggest putting into their hands.

Becoming Nicole (2015) - Amy Ellis Nutt
Nicole Maines played Dreamer, the first transgender superhero, on CW’s Supergirl (2015). A few years before appearing in Supergirl as well as cowriting Dreamer’s comic-book debut in Superman: Son of Kal-El (2021) and starring in the vampire film Bit (2019), Maines and her family were the topic of Amy Ellis Nutt’s book Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family. The book is an account of Maines’s realization that she was a trans girl and her family’s fight for Maines to receive appropriate medical treatment and social acceptance.

“If there is an inner distress,” Nutt writes about transgender children and adolescents, “it arises from knowing exactly who they are, but at the same time being locked into the wrong body and therefore being treated by others as belonging to one gender when they really feel they are the opposite. The dysfunction arises not from their own confusion, but from being made to feel like freaks or gender misfits'' (29). Nutt’s work helps to frame both how damaging and confusing ill-informed narratives about being trans can be and how helpful YA novels that feature trans characters will become.

Cemetery Boys (2020) - Aiden Thomas
Yadriel is a member of a Latinx community of brujx, who value traditions, many of which involve gendered roles and spaces. When Yadriel begins to live as a boy (i.e., transmasc), he is denied the ritual induction for a brujo. Yadriel is convinced, however, that he deserves to be blessed by Lady Death as a brujo. Should it take multiple demonstrations of magic and saving an entire community from destruction to be gendered correctly? Perhaps not, but that is the quest that Yadriel must undertake. Thomas’s message of community echoes a common theme in YA that features trans protagonists: the concept of being enough to occupy certain spaces. Parents, family, friends, teachers, classmates, pastors, lawmakers, career professionals, and virtually every other person on this planet can be a source of contestation for transgender adolescents. The site of confusion and denial most common amongst trans youths? Themselves.

Trans youths need allies because figuring out how to be trans at the same time as figuring out how to be you is difficult enough without anyone else making it more difficult. When adults cease trying to restrict and legislate trans youths out of existence, the real work of an empathetic and access-oriented society can truly begin.

Can’t Take that Away (2021) - Steven Salvatore
An irony of being a trans child, adolescent, or adult is the assumption that all trans people understand what it means to be trans. On the one hand, transphobes are so sure of their position; on the other, the journey to understanding what it means to be trans for each individual can take a lifetime. While many trans people may find their truest self at the other end of a traditional binary, many find who they are at a point somewhere else on the gender continuum. Others still find their identity to be an ever-shifting conception of gender—a further “queering” of gender. This process of discovery comes under even greater scrutiny in childhood and adolescence, when adults are eager to reduce young people’s decisions about identity to “phases” that aren’t worth serious consideration.

The opening scene of Salvatore’s Can’t Take that Away demonstrates the instability at play here. After Carey, a genderqueer adolescent, makes an interpretation of Holden Caulfield that involves a comment on “the plight of the straight cisgender bro,” his antagonist responds, “You don’t know shit. Are you gonna let he/she/it talk to me like that, Mr. Kelly?” (4). In this opening chapter, Salvatore collapses multiple complex debates about identity into the experience of a single adolescent. What readers must remember is that every trans child or adolescent has to negotiate these debates every day. The transphobic classmate, meanwhile, has no complexity to negotiate; even the teacher, who must negotiate between supporting LGBTQ+ students and keeping his job, only has the one complexity to negotiate.

Carey is not sure who he is, just that he is not part of the traditional gender binary. This uncertainty should be perfectly fine if adolescence is truly a time to wrestle with questions of identity. The central conflict of Can’t Take that Away is what happens when Carey is cast as Elphaba in the high school’s production of Wicked. Salvatore explores the issues that being genderqueer can present, but not at the expense of queer joy.

Victories Greater than Death (2021)/ Dreams Bigger than Heartbreak (2022) - Charlie Jane Anders
Charlie Jane Anders’s Unstoppable series is a showcase of what empathy looks like when it is valued or devalued. Tina is no ordinary human; she is the reincarnation of Captain Argentian of the Royal Fleet, a legendary intergalactic war hero. Whisked away from Earth and forced to choose Tina’s human body or Argentian’s alien body (and memories!), Tina begins to wonder whether she is truly trapped in the wrong body or not. Meanwhile, while the Royal Fleet may see the definition of “the right body” differently from the transphobes on Earth, they still lack empathy for those who do not look like them–i.e., alien species who do not possess humanoid-shaped bodies. Anders’s work of science-fiction and fantasy is an educative experience in intersectionality.

“To be trans,” Lester writes, “you have to be surer than you’ve ever been, because being trans is what you are when you’ve exhausted every other option” (42). When Tina brings some of Earth’s “best and brightest” onto the ship, she meets Elza, a transfemme girl. Elza, having been exiled by her parents and then by a hacker collective, finds community, friends, and love in the midst of a galactic war. In the sequel, Dreams Bigger than Heartbreak, Elza becomes one of the narrators. Now that the reader can experience Elza’s point of view, they can see that, even in space, the trauma of Earth and its many transphobes does not suddenly go away. Learning to live in one’s body is difficult enough; it is a victory to be celebrated, not demonized.

Nicole Maines provided Nutt with these thoughts at the end of Becoming Nicole: “I do not go through life thinking, ‘I’m trans, I’m trans, I’m trans,’ on repeat. I love bingeing on Netflix, I’m obsessed with food and video games, and I can’t stand weather below freezing. I don’t want to say my life is just like any other eighteen-year-old girl’s, though” (qtd. in Nutt 263). During this Transgender Awareness Week, I’ll be thinking about why a trans girl’s life—or the life of a trans boy, a nonbinary adolescent, a genderqueer adolescent, or an intersex adolescent—has to be different than any other adolescent’s life. One thing I know for sure: those trans adolescents? Whether you know it or not, they are students in your classrooms right now.

References
Anders, C. (2022). Dreams bigger than heartbreak. Tor Teen.
Anders, C. (2021). Victories greater than death. Tor Teen.
GLAAD. (n.d.) Transgender day of remembrance. GLAAD. https://www.glaad.org/tdor
GLAAD. (2022). Transgender awareness week. GLAAD. https://www.glaad.org/transweek
Lester, C.N. (2018) Trans like me: Conversations for all of us. Seal Press.
Nutt, A. (2015). Becoming Nicole: The transformation of an American family. Random House.
Salvatore, S. (2021). Can’t take that away. Bloomsbury YA.
Sedgwick, E. (1990). Epistemology of the closet. University of California Press.
Thomas, A. (2020). Cemetery boys. Swoon Reads.
Williams Institute. (2022) How many adults and youth identify as transgender in the United
States?. UCLA School of Law Williams Institute. https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/
publications/trans-adults-united-states/

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Registration is open for the virtual Summit on the Research and Teaching of Young Adult Literature! Plan on April 21, 2023, 8:30-5:30 CST.

ALAN Workshop 2022 Excitement: Tips for Newcomers by Dr. Gretchen Rumohr

The Role of Literacy Within YA Texts by Dr. Brady L. Nash

Transgender Awareness Week: Mourning, Empathy…and Maybe Even Some Joy by Dr. Sam Morris

Transgender Awareness Week: Mourning, Empathy…and Maybe Even Some Joy by Dr. Sam Morris

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Registration is open for the virtual Summit on the Research and Teaching of Young Adult Literature! Plan on April 21, 2023, 8:30-5:30 CST.

ALAN Workshop 2022 Excitement: Tips for Newcomers by Dr. Gretchen Rumohr

The Role of Literacy Within YA Texts by Dr. Brady L. Nash

Transgender Awareness Week: Mourning, Empathy…and Maybe Even Some Joy by Dr. Sam Morris

Transgender Awareness Week: Mourning, Empathy…and Maybe Even Some Joy by Dr. Sam Morris

Dr. Steve Bickmore​Creator and Curator

Co-Edited Books

Archives

Categories

Blogs to Follow

Dr. Steve Bickmore
Creator and Curator