Blog Archives

YA Summit 2026: How You Can Participate

10/27/2025

Why We Have YA Summits

Since 2018, a group of YA scholars and enthusiasts have been gathering either in persons or online to discuss the teaching and research of Young Adult Literature. This field remains robust. It continues to grow as many more scholars and teachers realize the value of using YA literature in their classrooms.

Those of us who spent time in the classroom realize that we had students who didn't read what we offered in our fairly traditional selections of literature, yet they read books written directly for them. Many students read volume after volume of large science fiction tomes, dove into the worlds of Twilight, the Hunger Games, or Divergent, or devoured the romances of Stephanie Perkins, Jenny Han, or Sarah Dessen.

What do we do with this awareness that many of our students who can read but don't read what we offer, yet read many other things?

We can keep doing the same old things or we might try to incorporate the books students are interrested in to achieve our curriculiar goals.

This delimma is a long and on going discussion. Much longer than a single blog post.

The 2026 Summit, however, is a place for the energetic discussion the teaching, the researh and advocacy for Young Adult Literature.

How Can You Participate This Year.

The next Summit is happening February 26 and 27, 2026 in an online format. Here is the link to summit webpage. On the summit webpage you can find the Call for Proposals, Conference registration, and information about past programs.

The first step is to plan to attend the Summit. Put it on your calendar and get ready to join the conversation.

The next step is to consider submitting a proposal yourself and help steer the conversation around something that fuels your academic interests.

Information on the Current Summit

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Take a Look at Some of the Past Authors Who Have Participated as Presenters and Discussants

The Summit has valued the active participation of YA authors. Over the years, the organizers have felt that listening to authors discuss their process and have them listen to the way researchers and teachers adds to the overall discussion.

Authors are valued participants in the summit and they are encouraged to submit their own proposals.

Stay tuned, you just might fined another you are interested in participating in the Summit as the proposals come in and the program is finalized.

Take a look as the authors who have participated in the past. Maybe one of your favorites is listed.

It was great fun to look back through the past summit and reminices about all of the authors the summit has hosted in the past. I hope to see you at the 2026 Summit in February of 2026.

Reacquainted with the Weird: A Journey Through Shirley Jackson’s Works

10/22/2025

Meet Our Contributor:

Roy Edward Jackson is an assistant professor of education at Goshen College in Indiana with a focus on literacy. He holds degrees in English, Education and School Library Science.

Reacquainted with the Weird: A Journey Through Shirley Jackson’s Works by Roy Jackson

I love Halloween. But this year, I found myself a bit stuck on what to write about. I wandered through my campus library looking for inspiration, yet nothing caught my interest. I scrolled endlessly through my social media feeds, but nothing stood out there either. Then, a few weeks ago at my local public library, I read that my friend and writing mentor had been nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award. That news sent me spiraling back to my last year teaching high school language arts before moving into higher education.

I had taught at a creative and performing arts high school where my senior creative writing majors were reading Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle as a mentor text. We used a PDF version—no doubt a cost-saving measure—but I realized I had never actually held the book in my hands. And a digital PDF, I contend, is nowhere near the experience of holding a printed book. I made my way to the YA section, where I was immediately struck by the fantastic covers of the reissues of Jackson’s seminal works. I gathered a stack and began re-reading her stories, one by one, as if meeting an old friend anew.

My high school creative writers loved We Have Always Lived in the Castle. The urban public high school came with all sorts of academic, and geographical, freedom. We had the kind of freedom that let us take our learning beyond the classroom walls to the streets of our city. So, we made our way to the Carnegie Central Library and perused Jackson’s collection. Most were shelved in the YA collection. The students choose in partnerships a Jackson short story for a comparative writerly activity. I feared they would find this boring, but the engagement was strong, and they alerted me to stories I’d never read. We culminated the unit with watching the stylistic 2018 film adaptation.

Looking back, there was so much more I wish I had done with my student writers. I could have emphasized Jackson’s role as a female writer in a male-dominated industry, her groundbreaking work as a speculative writer, and the way she masterfully blended the real world with the uncanny. Since these students attended a creative and performing arts high school with a creative writing concentration, I wish I had been more familiar with Jackson’s lectures at the time.

In the collection Come Along With Me, her lecture “Biography of a Story” recalls the day she sent off The Lottery to The New Yorker. Written only three weeks earlier, Jackson herself may not have realized just how groundbreaking the story would be. In the lecture, she describes the flood of letters forwarded to her by the magazine, noting that there were “three main themes which dominate the letters that first summer—three themes which might be identified as bewilderment, speculation, and plain old-fashioned abuse” (214).

In the age of social media, students might find compelling connections between those public responses and the way readers react to writing today. Even more striking, those letters were handwritten and delivered through the mail. I can’t help but wonder if my students could truly grasp the impact of receiving such a thing.

Reading We Have Always Lived in the Castle with my high school writers took me back to my only experience with Shirley Jackson in high school. Like most, it was the short story The Lottery, one of the most vivid reading memories from my own high school years. Having been reared on Steinbeck, Hawthorne, Melville, and even Salinger, all taught by mostly white, male teachers, The Lottery was a game changer. It was new to me in both form and genre. While I had read traditional horror novels and novellas, The Lottery was my first true foray into speculative fiction. The gut punch it delivers to first-time readers is jarring and, strangely enough, a special kind of reading experience.

At the time, I did not think much about authorship, but in retrospect, Jackson stands out as a woman writing in a genre long dominated by men, a reality that persists even today. I had been inundated with the white, male dominance of the literary canon, and I wish my teachers had pointed out how rare it was to encounter a female voice in horror, mystery, or speculative fiction.

I think in today’s world of the “new weird,” laying the foundation with what Jackson created is essential for both readers and writers. The Lottery is a seminal work, but so are The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. In our educational landscape, where long-form reading and student choice have often evaporated in favor of short, prompt-based writing aimed at higher standardized test scores, I find that not only educators like me but also students are longing for both depth and freedom.

Shirley Jackson feels like the perfect writer to begin with this time of year. Students can enter her speculative world through The Lottery and engage in rich discussions about community and superstition — “Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon.”

They can also consider how little it takes to bend our own world to make it frightening, and how true horror may not lie in mass violence, but in a world so familiar to our own that only the slightest distortion reveals the darkest parts of human nature.

After entering through the most famous of her short works, students could choose among Jackson’s novels like The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and find companion short stories such as “The Witch,” “Flower Garden,” and “Like Mother Used to Make.” Discussions of the short form could focus on when and how Jackson so effectively pivots the familiar world into the speculative. Novel studies could take on a book club format, allowing students to guide their own conversations and see what develops organically. I can’t help but wonder if themes like social isolation and persecution, gothic domesticity, and the slow descent into madness through solitude would emerge naturally in their discussions.

All of this could culminate in at-home or in-class viewings of film adaptations. From the 1960s Encyclopedia Britannica produced an almost too realistic short movie version of The Lottery to the less faithful 1996 adaptation, students could see how different directors interpret Jackson’s work. There are also two fascinating adaptations of The Haunting of Hill House (1963 and 1999), along with the visually stunning 2018 film version of We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Lastly, there is the biopic (2020), Shirley, starring Elizabeth Moss that is a great companion piece to her lectures.

This kind of exploration reflects what I loved most about teaching at a public creative and performing arts high school—and what seems largely absent in traditional schools so focused on testing: the creative writing project. Through carefully curated prompts, students could emulate how to bend their natural world ever so slightly to make it weird, horrific, and most importantly, point a lens the way Jackson did on our societal norms that are so weird to begin with.

Reacquainting myself with Shirley Jackson’s wonderfully weird works has been a reminder of the enduring power of her writing: how it challenges us to see the ordinary as strange, to question the rules we take for granted, and to recognize that horror and insight often emerge from the smallest shifts in perspective. For students, for educators, and for readers of all ages, engaging with her work offers not only a journey into the uncanny but also a model for how to make the familiar extraordinary. Particularly when living in extraordinary times when the strange seems to have become the norm.

Jen Calonita - Fairy Godmother and Tinker Bell

10/15/2025

Meet Our Contributor:

Dr. Melanie Hundley is a Professor in the Practice of English Education at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College; her research examines how AI, digital and multimodal composition informs the development of pre-service teachers’ writing pedagogy. Additionally, she explores the use of AI, digital and social media in young adult literature. She teaches writing methods courses that focus on AI, digital and multimodal composition and young adult literature courses that explore diversity, culture, and storytelling in young adult texts. She teaches AI and literacy courses including AI and Storytelling. Her current research focus has three strands: AI in writing, AI in Teacher Education, and Verse Novels in Young Adult Literature She is currently the Coordinator of the Secondary Education English Education program in the Department of Teaching and Learning at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College.

Jen Calonita - Fairy Godmother and Tinker Bell

Storytelling is one of our oldest and most magical arts. Stories help us make sense of the world; they help us connect across generations, learn empathy, entertain each other, and share culture. We hear “once upon a time” or “there once was a” or “a long time ago” and something in us settles in for story time. There is a long literary history of fairy tale and myth retellings that make old stories new again, making them relevant for new generations. Retellings of myths, fairy tales, and classic tales from literature or movies offers a rich landscape for creativity and cultural dialogue. Authors ask, “What if…” and imagine a new life for characters that we know well from old stories. Retellings allow new generations of storytellers to reinterpret and reimagine these stories, to personalize them, to make them relevant for new audiences.

Retelling myths and classic stories connects us to our past, preserving cultural heritage and continuity. These stories are shared cultural touchstones, and by retelling them, we keep them alive. This helps us understand the values, fears, and aspirations of those who came before us. Expanding on these stories in new formats or updated retellings keeps these connections fresh, showing how universal themes—like love, betrayal, heroism, and sacrifice—are still relevant today.

Many traditional tales include outdated or problematic themes, particularly regarding gender, race, and power dynamics. Retelling these stories allows us to critique, reinterpret, and update them, aligning the narratives with current values and perspectives. For example, reimagining “Beauty and the Beast” as a story about empathy and mutual respect, or Shakespeare’s works as explorations of modern political themes, allows new generations to connect with the stories in a way that aligns with contemporary values.

Jen Calonita

Jen Calonita, one of my favorite middle grade and young adult authors, is currently reimagining some of my favorite childhood Disney movies. Fairy Godmother asks, How does one become a fairy godmother? How did Cinderella’s fairy godmother become a fairy godmother? Her newest novel, Tinker Bell, considers Tinker Bell’s backstory. Who was she before The Lost Boys? Retellings offer a blend of the familiar and the unexpected, which can be both comforting and intriguing for audiences—Jen’s retellings of these stories draw our attention to characters who were not the main characters in the Disney movies.

Mentor Text

The National Writing Project defines mentor texts “ pieces of literature that you…can return to and reread for many different purposes. They are texts to be studied and imitated… Mentor texts help students to take risks and be different writers tomorrow than they are today. It helps them to try out new strategies and formats.” Jen Calonita’s novels serve as a master class in the art and craft of writing.

Fairy Godmother

One of the particular strengths of Jen’s writing is her skill at descriptive hooks that pull the reader into the story. Her opening for Fairy Godmother, for example, does a deep dive into the blue dress that Cinderella wore at the ball BUT what it does well is provide insight into Renee, our new main character.

Consider the opening:

Well, she’d done one thing right. Blue, it was clear, was the girl’s color.

To call the gown blue, however, was doing it a disservice. The color was more a cross between azure and cyan. Brighter than a clear summer day, the tone was practically luminescent, the exact shade of the girl’s eyes, which, Renee thought, getting misty, were the same shade as her mother’s. In fact, it was Ella’s mother’s gown she’d transformed that night. Was she watching this all from somewhere in the universe? (Fairy Godmother, Calonita, p. 1)

Notice the mix of sentences, the description of blue, and the rich vocabulary in the passage. There is so much that the students can use as a mentor for their writing. While the description focuses on the beautiful blue dress that we all remember from the movie, we gain insight into Renee. We see her connection to Ella, to Ella’s mother, and to her role as fairy godmother.

What Students Can Do

After Vanderbilt’s 2024 win against Alabama, Marissa and Elizabeth (two students) used the opening as a mentor text and created the following piece of writing:

To call the team’s jerseys black, however, was doing them a disservice. The color was more a cross between ebony and sable. Glossier and deeper than a starless summer night, the tone was practically pitch, the exact shade of charcoal, which, the Commodores thought, eyes glinting with determination, stood in stark contrast to the losing Crimson Tide. In fact, it was this team that finally anchored down that night. What did they think when the odds finally turned in our favor?

We learn more about Renee through her actions. We see her humor and playfulness: “Renée was never beneath putting a leaf under her nose to make a mustache, dancing in the river (when it wasn’t moving this fast), or singing loud off-key. Anything to keep the two of them laughing. It was her favorite sound in the world.” This can serve as an example of characterization implied by characters’ actions. Or we can look at how she uses dialogue to further a relationship between characters.

“‘I like mysteries,’ he says as a new song began to play. ‘They remind me of peeling onions. Something new in every layer.’

‘Or a bruised apple,’ she offered. ‘Sometimes the fruit underneath is unexpectedly crisp.”

This can serve as a model for students who are trying to write dialogue that shows something about the characters. We learn a great deal about Renee, Cinderella’s fairy godmother, and her backstory throughout the novel.

Tinker Bell

The novel, Tinker Bell, opens with a deep dive into Tinker Bell as a character:

Tinker Bell had never been fond of the word NO.

            Or can’t.
            Or impossible.

They were useless sentiments, really. They certainly never served Tinker Bell well. Not when she was creating a (revolutionary) pixie dust replenishment system. Now when she was fixing a rain collector. Not lately, as Tink explored Never Land, searching for wonders, uncovering secrets. To Tink, impossible was just a problem to be solved. So, whenever the fairy encountered a block, Tinker Bell found a way to fly around it. (Tinker Bell, Calonita, p. 1)

The character description provides insight into a beloved character. We see her as a rebel and an inventor. She becomes more than the small fairy who flies around the Lost Boys. We see her strength and determination, but we also see her…attitude.

Tinker Bell introduces us to her best friend, Ash by describing him in terms of contrasts:

Ash was both Tink’s fiercest ally and greatest adversary. Her fairy confidant, conscience, and the only one she trusted to pick debris out of her wings. He drove her mad with his hovering. Sometimes he flew so close, Tink couldn’t tell if the sound of flapping was her wings or his. (Tinker Bell, Calonita, p. 7)

The language of this passage tells us a great deal about Ash and Tink’s relationship with him. It is also a good mentor text for students. As a writing teacher, I would use it as a dependent authorship text:

Prompt

Describe a person you care deeply about, an artist that you follow, or a character that you really like using the following template:

Name of the Main Person/Artist/Character:

__________ was both __________ (person with whom main character has a relationship with) __________ (adjective) __________ (noun) and __________ (adjective) __________ (noun). Her __________ (noun), __________ (noun), and the only one __________ (person with whom main character has a relationship with) trusted to __________ (clause). __________ (pronoun) drove __________ (pronoun) mad with ________ (pronoun). Sometimes __________ (pronoun) __________ (phrase), __________ (clause).

Both novels are rich and engaging novels that can serve as mentor texts for writers at any level. Jen’s writing is powerful and engaging. She takes old stories and shifts our view from the original main character to one of the supporting characters. Retellings offer an opportunity to tell stories from different perspectives, often those of characters who were marginalized or simplified in the original versions. This enriches the story world and can provide a fuller understanding of its characters and themes. Jen’s novels expand the story world and also provide strong mentor texts for writers.

Texts to Build Foundational Climate and Environmental Awareness with High School Students

10/8/2025

Meet Our Contributor:

Stephanie Branson is a fierce advocate for young adult literature and authentic writing pedagogy, with a focus on fostering student engagement through diverse text selections. She has been a literacy leader as a high school English teacher, district-level learning facilitator, and curriculum writer in one of Texas’s largest public school districts for the past 13 years. Stephanie earned her undergraduate degree from Louisiana State University in the Geaux Teach English cohort and her graduate degree from the University of North Texas in Literacy Curriculum and Instruction. She has presented at both the National Council for Teachers of English and the Texas Council of Teachers of English Language Arts. She can be reached at [email protected]. Please connect!

Texts to Build Foundational Climate and Environmental Awareness with High School Students

The environment and climate are not just scientific areas to be studied but are significant forces influencing Earth that have clear social, cultural, and ethical implications. Introducing students to conversations about the environment requires careful and intentional framing that moves beyond larger concrete concepts and grounds discussions in the lived experiences of others. Teenagers are hard to please! Why should they care about something so beyond their current reality? Therein lies our charge as ethical educators in the public-school classroom.

Building foundational climate and environmental awareness within students can be a difficult topic to navigate in a way that maintains the classroom community when considering the real complexity of the related issues. The classroom provides an essential, safe space for this work, allowing young people to encounter ideas about human environmental relationships, ethical responsibilities of different groups, and sustainability through the lens of literature.

Young adult literature and nonfiction in particular offer a common and accessible ground for this initial exploration, merging a prior comfortability and ease with narrative and story with newer topics for critical inquiry. By guiding students to analyze characters’ relationships with place, a community’s impact on the environment, and consequences of actions, English and literacy teachers can cultivate both cultural and environmental empathy with critical literacy skills. Discussions around climate and the environment are multifaceted and challenging, especially when discussing the communities who live and confront this reality firsthand. An approach using young adult literature not only deepens reading and writing comprehension and analysis but also empowers students to consider their roles as humans and citizens within the larger context of our world.

My current junior-level English 3 students do not interact with these bigger ideas of climate, environmental impacts, and the ethics surrounding environmental issues on most days. They are busy living their teenage lives: going to school, practicing their musical pursuits, clobbering each other at athletics practice. Aside from a handful of scientifically-motivated students and to-the-core change makers, these students have a variety of other worries that are in their face impacting them daily; climate and the environment are two forces that feel “far” from them as these are not in their sphere of relevancy. This is where young adult literature comes in and has the ability to make significant impacts. If we can flood our classroom libraries with books that tactfully build foundational awareness surrounding climate and the environment, students will have the opportunity to open their minds and frame these concepts in the broader context of their lives.

Dry by Neal and Jarrod Shusterman is one of the most engaging, yet profound works of environmental criticism for young and teen readers. This novel, a fast-paced survival thriller, allows students to dig into the nuanced topics of ethical resource stewardship, resource declination, human morality, mob mentality, and social order disruption when extreme weather events occur. Paced around a water scarcity crisis in California, the two dual protagonists, Kelton and Alyssa, are faced with obstacles they must overcome to ensure their survival. Students will be able to make connections with our current society and the real-world consequences of environmental decisions, understanding how environmental stressors can affect communities, political and social systems, and individual decision-making.

Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi is another survival novel, this time taking place in a future that feels entirely dystopic. Rising sea levels and devastating hurricanes and weather events have transformed the now-Gulf Coast into a memory of its former self. Coastal cities, such as New Orleans, have been completely submerged and citizens have convened into tribes and factions based on their physical strengths and qualities. The protagonist, Nailer, works for a salvage crew of beached ships when a large hurricane brings in a luxurious ship with a sole survivor. The protagonist must decide whether to leverage the survivor for his gain or deliver her to safety. This text allows students to understand the outcomes of environmental collapse, systemic inequality, and the difficult moral choices that come up when survival is the only goal. Students can examine how power, gender and financial privilege, and resource scarcity come together, as well as reflect on how negative environmental changes disproportionately impact vulnerable communities.

Fault Lines by Nora Shalaway Carpenter takes a completely different approach to building climate and environmental awareness through forging intertwined relationships in this mostly-realistic fiction novel. This novel is set in the beautiful and magnetic current-day Appalachian West Virginia and follows two teens working through personal crises of their own. This novel centers around the criticism of and simultaneously need for fracking in America’s rural communities. Carpenter takes a thoughtful and nuanced approach to describing the lived experiences and true struggles of the communities in rural America – an approach that is both balanced and critical of the use of these lands for oil development. Whereas some works may simply criticize fracking and oil development with scathing commentary, Carpenter brings a fresh perspective with complexity and addresses these concerns with sensitivity. On one hand, fracking can destroy these lands held dear, but this industry also provides numerous jobs and opportunities to communities where employment is already scarce. Like I said, this book is nuanced and full of gray space. There is no clear right or wrong and students can discover the complexity of these issues with their own conclusions through the insights provided in this fictional community and relationship between the protagonists.

I hope these three novels can inspire a new focus to bookshelves, book clubs, or even a whole-class novel study and can engage conversations with students about the future of our world. If we all do our best to make our tiny piece of society better, I know we will be left with something more beautiful than we even have now. I want to leave this with my favorite quote from Dry: “Putting me at the forefront of his thoughts drew out what little energy he had left, just as when I had focused on helping him--and I realize that this is the true core of human nature: When we’ve lost the strength to save ourselves, we somehow find the strength to save each other

Using The Collectors edited by A. S. King in the iHgh School Classroom

10/1/2025

Meet our Contributor

Kate Youngblood has been teaching 9th and 11th grade English at Benjamin Franklin High School in New Orleans, Louisiana for the past eleven years. She graduated from Louisiana State University with a BA in English, secondary education. She later earned her M.A.Ed. from Wake Forest University. She has presented at the National Council of Teachers of English Annual Convention six times and has been published as a co-author in Signal Journal and English in Education. Kate was selected as the Louisiana State High School Teacher of the Year in 2021. She can be reached at [email protected].

The Collectors edited by A. S. King by Kate Youngblood

I live in a notoriously weird city.

In New Orleans, we wear costumes on weekdays, we second line at funerals, we gleefully rip heads off of crawfish before devouring them while out of towners look on in horror.

Weirdness in high school is often undervalued, however, even in a city as joyfully odd as New Orleans. High school students crave assimilation, believing adolescence will be easier if they fit in rather than stand out. I teach 9th graders, and one of my favorite parts about them is, especially in August, many still enter the school with their weirdness intact. I view it as part of my job to make them see those strange, different, out of sync parts of themselves as critical to their identity.

So, I was thrilled to read A.S. King’s foreword to her Printz award winning anthology, The Collectors: “There is currency in weirdness… There are no rules. There is no normal… You can be as weird as you want” (3).

This advice to students echoes so much about how I want my students to feel as they enter high school; to have a collection of short stories where weirdness was the operating principle felt like kismet.

My freshmen were assigned 5 of the short stories from this collection (though, of course, I encouraged them to read them all!): “Play House” by Anna-Marie McLemore, “Take It From Me” by David Levithan, “Ring of Fire” by Jenny Torres-Sanchez, “A Recording For Carole Before It All Goes” by Jason Reynolds, and “Sweet Everlasting” by M.T. Anderson.

These stories allowed us to dive deeply into identifying literary elements and techniques, building student confidence for their ability to notice the moves authors make and connecting them to their impact. “Play House” showed us how metaphors impact mood. “Take It From Me” made us question narrator reliability. “Ring of Fire” illuminated the power of symbols. “A Recording for Carole Before It All Goes” pushed syntax to the forefront of our discussions. “Sweet Everlasting” put characterization on full display.

These texts were all rich and layered, but still accessible to 9th graders. More importantly, they were all so obviously weird and different, making them exciting for students to discuss. More than 5 parents reached out to me to say that their kids were actually talking to them about the reading at home! One said she’d overheard her daughter on the phone with another students, animatedly saying, “But do you think the fire was real?” The stories did what great literature does: crept into their brains and their lives beyond the confines of the school building.

For our final project on the unit, students created a literary square analysis project, which I adapted from The Daring English Teacher. Here is the version that I gave my students: our project. Grading these projects did the same thing for me that reading the stories did for my students: it delighted me. I loved seeing their creative interpretations of the texts, I loved learning which students had read beyond the five required stories, I loved reading their pithy and funny and heartfelt reviews.

I always struggle with whether or not to start my 9th grade classes with a whole class novel. I like the experience of reading something together, in unison. But sometimes starting with a novel feels simultaneously over and underwhelming: students who are transitioning to a whole new world get bogged down in reading 20-30 pages a night and easily fall behind, class discussions sometimes take a while to heat up as the exposition drags on, and trust in me and my taste is under established.

This collection of short stories feels like the perfect solution. The texts are challenging and varied. The protagonists range from relatable to demonic (literally). There is some story in the anthology for each student. I am so happy to have found this collection which allowed me to set the tone for both the nitty gritty and the existential elements of my classroom: this is how we do English and this is how you do life.

A.S. King’s final words in the foreword anchor my class now: “Be defiantly creative. Make art of your life, especially if you don’t consider yourself an artist – collect all the little pieces of you and make your story. When you look back many years from now, you will see something extraordinary and impossible to duplicate. You will see you” (3).

YA Summit 2026: How You Can Participate

Why We Have YA Summits

How Can You Participate This Year.

Information on the Current Summit

Take a Look at Some of the Past Authors Who Have Participated as Presenters and Discussants

Reacquainted with the Weird: A Journey Through Shirley Jackson’s Works

Meet Our Contributor:

Reacquainted with the Weird: A Journey Through Shirley Jackson’s Works by Roy Jackson

Jen Calonita - Fairy Godmother and Tinker Bell

Meet Our Contributor:

Jen Calonita - Fairy Godmother and Tinker Bell

Jen Calonita

Mentor Text

Fairy Godmother

What Students Can Do

Tinker Bell

Prompt

Texts to Build Foundational Climate and Environmental Awareness with High School Students

Meet Our Contributor:

Texts to Build Foundational Climate and Environmental Awareness with High School Students

Using The Collectors edited by A. S. King in the iHgh School Classroom

Meet our Contributor

The Collectors edited by A. S. King by Kate Youngblood

Dr. Steve Bickmore
Creator and Curator

Bickmore's
Co-Edited Books

Archives

Categories

Blogs to Follow

Why We Have YA Summits

How Can You Participate This Year.

Information on the Current Summit

Take a Look at Some of the Past Authors Who Have Participated as Presenters and Discussants

Meet Our Contributor:

Reacquainted with the Weird: A Journey Through Shirley Jackson’s Works by Roy Jackson

Meet Our Contributor:

Jen Calonita

Mentor Text

What Students Can Do

Prompt

Meet Our Contributor:

​Texts to Build Foundational Climate and Environmental Awareness with High School Students

Meet our Contributor

The Collectors edited by A. S. King by Kate Youngblood

Dr. Steve Bickmore​Creator and Curator

Bickmore's ​Co-Edited Books

Archives

Categories

Blogs to Follow

Texts to Build Foundational Climate and Environmental Awareness with High School Students

Dr. Steve Bickmore
Creator and Curator

Bickmore's
Co-Edited Books