KidLitCon 2015!

"If you teach teenagers, you know it is impossible to save them. They are going to be miserable, they are going to be uncomfortable. They are going to suffer, and even people who love them can do nothing about it. And maybe that's why teenagers make people nervous, why they don't like them." 

Just Announced: The KidLitCon author signing and reception on October 9th at 3-5pm, will be open to the public! Meet 31 authors in the lobby of the HyattPlace hotel,  511 South Central Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21202.

Book sales by Atomic Books of Hampden.

Jorge Aguirre -- Giants Beware! and Dragons Beware!

Marc Alpert -- The Six

Tracey Baptiste -- The Jumbies

Elisabeth Dahl -- Genie Wishes

Zetta Elliott -- A Wish After Midnight

Mary Fan -- Brave New Girls

Alison Formento -- This Tree Counts!

Alissa Grosso -- Shallow Pond

Erin Hagar -- Julia Child: An Extraordinary Life

Mary Downing Hahn -- Took

Jay Hosler -- The Last of the Sandwalkers

Jacqueline Jules --  Unite or Die: How Thirteen States Became a Nation

Anne Levy -- Temple of Doubt

Kathy MacMillan -- Sword and Verse

Carrie Mesrobian -- Cut Both Ways

Kevin O’Malley -- Take me out to the Ballgame

Erica Perl -- When Life Gives You O.J.

Matt Phelan -- Marilyn’s Monster

Dan Poblocki -- The House on Stone’s Throw Island

Ellen Prager -- Tristan and the Sea Guardians

Rafael Rosado -- Giants Beware! and Dragons Beware!

Wendy Shang -- The Way Home Looks Now

Ronald L. Smith -- Hoodoo

Shadra Strickland -- Please Louise

Guinevere Tomas -- The Mark of Noba

Libertad Tomas -- The Mark of Noba

Maggie Thrash -- Honor Girl

Nancy Viau -- City Street Beat

Elissa Brent Weissman -- Nerd Camp

Carol Weston -- Ava and Taco Cat

Advance registration is closed for KidLitCon 2015, but there’s still a chance to join us and to score heaping helpings of publisher-provided swag! You can register at the door for either Friday or Saturday sessions. Either day is $50.

And you totally should - because in addition to the incisive and sparkling speakers and panels we have planned, we have accumulated a truly impressive amount of books and bookmarks and posters to distribute to KidLitCon attendees.

Check it out:

Publishers recognize the value of people who write about children’s literature - often for free - and we have had wonderful response from the people who benefit monetarily from the passionate conversations and reviews that KidLitCon attendees post all year long.

We’ve got boxes and bales and stacks of books from Little, Brown, Candlewick, Bearport, Papercutz, and more! But you can’t have that creepy statue in the above picture - that stays at Sheila’s house.

by Anne Boles Levy, author of The Temple of Doubt

I like handing out fabulous prizes. I imagine that on Valentine’s Day every year, a bunch of authors wake up to a big hug from the Cybils judges. Hey, look, we love you! Maybe it’s not really the same as giving flowers or chocolate, but you can’t stick those things on your book cover anyway, like you can with our shiny stickers. 

But it’s a long journey from nominations to winner, at least for judges. We’re the ones charged with whittling down the initial entries into a manageable short list, and then winners. That means reading, debating, more reading … and still more reading. Whew.

So what does it take for a book to break out of the pack? What are judges looking for? The panel “And the winner is …” takes a sneak peek behind the scenes with judges from some of your favorite book awards. We’ll discuss what we love (or even hate) about judging, and try to dispense some pithy advice to writers, readers, and bloggers about what our awards are really all about.

Joining me on the panel:

Liz Burns (Printz, Schneider Family, Cybils, YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction, Edwards - currently serving)

Francisca Goldsmith (California Young Reader Medal, Odyssey Award, Printz Award, Eisner Awards, Audie Awards, and Alex Awards) Susan Kusel (Caldecott, Cybils, Maryland Blue Crab Award, Sydney Taylor Award)

Jennie Rothschild (Cybils, YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction, YALSA/ARCL Outstanding Books for the College Bound (chair), Maryland Library Association Blue Crab Award)

John Scott (Caldecott, Newbery - currently serving)

Alysa Stewart (Cybils)

One of the best things about KidLitCon is the chance to meet and hang out with so many smart, interesting people who share a passion for children's and YA literature. To give you a taste, here's a partial list of attendees.

There's only one week left to register for KidLitCon, and only three more days to get the Early Bird rate and save $25, so don't delay! Register Now

Paula Willey unadulterated.us

Sheila Ruth Wands and Worlds

Melissa Fox Book Nut

Jen Robinson Jen Robinson's Book Page

Kathy MacMillan KathyMacMillan.com

Barb Langridge ABookandaHug

Cecilia Cackley Latin@s in Kid Lit

Alysa Stewart Everead

Alex Baugh Randomly Reading

Matthew Winner The Busy Librarian

Sharon Lanasa

Sondy Eklund Sonderbooks

Liz Brown Between the Covers

Pam Brown Margolis An Unconventional Librarian

Ms. Yingling Ms. Yingling Reads

Dr. Ellen Prager Tristan Hunt and the Sea Guardians

Marjorie Ingall Tablet Magazine, MarjorieIngall.com

Liz Burns A Chair, A Fireplace, & A Tea Cozy

Minh Lê Minh Lê Books / Bottom Shelf Books

Katy Manck BooksYALove

Becky Birtha Becky&Books

Sam Musher Parenthetical

Miriam DesHarnais

Judy Poyer

Cecelia Larsen Adventures of Cecelia Bedelia

Katy Kramp alibrarymama

Libertad Araceli Thomas Twinja Book Reviews

Guinevere Zoyana Thomas Twinja Book Reviews

Charlotte Tayor Charlotte's Library

Shayna Parr Bibliophilia: A Love Story

Ellen Zschunke On The Shelf 4 Kids

Susan Kusel Wizards Wireless

Nancy Peters

Carol Weston

Laura Arnhold Literacious

You...

KidLitCon 2015 will be held October 9-10, 2015, in Baltimore, MD. Here are some helpful links!

Register

Get the conference discount on your room reservation

See the full schedule

by Sam Musher, opinionated middle school librarian

“Middle Grade” has become YA’s ignored younger sibling. I’ve seen everything from Harriet the Spy to Holes to Hunger Games classified as “Young Adult” in popular media, and as a middle school librarian, it drives me bonkers. (Protip: only one of those is legitimately YA.) Cut through the confusion with this panel, where we’ll talk about books for the misunderstood but wonderful 9-13 Middle Grade age group.

What gets kids this age excited to pick up a book? How do authors address difficult topics in a way that resonates with tweens from all backgrounds? What is a “boy book” or a “girl book,” or is that distinction total b.s.? What do authors love about writing for this age group? And what distinguishes Middle Grade from Young Adult, anyway?

Our fabulous panelists include:

Elisabeth Dahl, author of Genie Wishes (which is, appropriately enough for this conference, about a 5th grade blogger), who also teaches writing at the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth

Erica Perl, the author of When Life Gives You OJ, who works to get books into the hands of kids in need through the amazing non-profit First Book

Wendy Shang, who deals with issues of racism, sexism, family, and baseball in the brand-new The Way Home Looks Now

Elissa Brent Weissman, the author of the Cybils award winner Nerd Camp and other books about smartypants middle graders

Carol Weston, author of Ava and Pip, as well as the extremely long-running “Dear Carol” advice column in Girls’ Life magazine

We’ll wrap up with a rousing chant of, “Middle Grade is not YA!”

This panel sponsored by Brightly - a resource to help parents raise lifelong readers.

by Paula Willey, unadulterated.us

It's great to write whatever you want. I love writing my kidlit blog, and my horror tumblr, and my personal blog. I apparently have a deep need to swear online and use bad syntax.

But it is awfully nice to get acknowledged for your skills. It’s extremely satisfying to see your opinions and reviews reach an audience wider than - well in my case, the 5 or 6 people who sometimes read unadulterated.us. And it is a whole new level of excellent when people start paying you to do what you love.

People in our community often have questions about how you get to that point. What are the opportunities? Do you have to hew to different standards when you’re writing for others? Who pays, and - let’s be frank - how much? 

Going Wide will be a round-table discussion between:

A professional journalist: Marjorie Ingall, current contributor to Tablet magazine, one half of the blog sorrywatch.com, and formerly Margie of the late great Sassy magazine OMG!

An SLJ associate editor: Mahnaz Dar, who will give us a live demonstration of how she shakes and bakes your carefully crafted prose to turn it into a dynamo of economical expression.

A teen blogger: Marissa Rodriguez of Marissa Nicole Reads. What’s it like starting from scratch now? How do you make contacts and promote yourself?

And two jacks of all trades: Charlotte Taylor, who writes for Barnes & Noble and for her own blog, Charlotte’s Library; and me, Paula Willey - I write for pretty much anyone who asks, and get paid for about 30% of it.

Register today to get in on this down-to-earth discussion with industry veterans and newbies alike! 

by Karen Yingling, middle school librarian and author of Ms Yingling Reads

My middle school students avidly ask for murder mysteries, and are surprised that writers tend to produce stories about neighborhood dogs being kidnapped rather than tales dripping with blood and gore. As a librarian who preferred Beverly Cleary as a child and hid sobbing under the couch when the Child Catcher came onscreen in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, it can be hard for me to find horror books that meet the bloodthirsty criteria of my students and still allow me to sleep at night after I’ve read them. 

The Kidlitcon 2015 Middle Grade Horror Panel will be an excellent time to talk to some of the scariest writers in the Kidlitosphere today– Tracey Baptiste, Mary Downing Hahn, Dan Poblocki, and Ronald L. Smith. We’ll talk about why young readers like to be scared, what scares them, and how teachers and librarians can meet their literary needs without getting calls from angry parents when the children wake up screaming in the middle of the night. 

That said, I think I may need to bring my blankie to Baltimore– I can’t talk about creepy dolls without something wrapped around my shoulders, and it will be hard for me to ask questions if I have my head buried under a pillow!

Ladies and gentlemen, give it up for Matthew Winner, host of the Let’s Get Busy podcast:

Podcasting is easy. Podcasting is simple. Podcasting allows for an immediate intimacy with your audience. And also, podcasts are cool. 

You've heard of Serial, no doubt. You know, that wonderful podcast produced by the folks at This American Life that focused on reexamining a real life scene of the crime and those involved to shed light on a story that might differ from the one told in the court records. 

Podcasts are like radio on demand. And absolutely anyone can make a podcast and it takes very little production cost to get started. 

So why is it that kidlit podcasts don't seem to be all that prevalent? Let's change that!

In Kidlit Podcasting I'll share a look behind the curtain on how I produce Let's Get Busy, including the way the podcast has adapted over the past two years, the tools I've found most helpful for reaching an audience, and who exactly it is at this moment who's listening to kidlit podcasts. I'm certainly not alone in kidlit podcasting, so you'll also get to meet the other kidlit podcast colleagues that I think are awesome.

by Miriam DesHarnais, education librarian and graphic novel enthusiast

(page from Last of the Sandwalkers by Jay Hosler)

Jay Hosler (Last of the Sandwalkers)

Maggie Thrash (Honor Girl)

Rafael Rosado & Jorge Aguirre (Dragons Beware!)

Let me tell you a story. Not so very long ago, last year in fact, there was a school librarian who wanted to start the year off right for her new 5th and 6th graders. Yes, she knew the students should get oriented to the library, learn where the books are, and learn about databases and citations and how to take notes. But what if, for library orientation, they just got to know each other, and got to tap back into the playfulness of elementary school? They’d probably been hearing a lot in their orientation about middle school, and the ways it wasn’t going to be like what came before. 

So the class gathered in the library in a circle, and did some silly movement exercises, and then had a chat about breakfast, what they liked and what they didn’t like. And as the students spoke, the librarian illustrated the breakfast items on the board. One girl shared her recipe for Huevos Rancheros and the librarian drew step-by-step pictures of that too, and everyone gave the Huevos Rancheros girl a round of applause at the end. Then, even though they were middle schoolers, the librarian read them I Want My Hat Back by Jon Klassen, and a chapter of The True Meaning of Smekday by Adam Rex, and the students demanded she pass around her iPad so they could look at the comic book parts.

(from Dragons Beware! by Rafael Rosado and Jorge Aguirre)

When the class left they were happy and relaxed, or at least they seemed that way to the librarian, who noticed that from then on all of the 5th and 6th graders knew her name, and greeted her in the hall, and that many of them started visiting the library between classes, and after school. And when they Skyped with Kate Klise or were visited by Kevin Sherry, playing guitar in his yeti costume, something solidified in that grade’s relationship with the library. Some of them started working as library assistants during lunch, even though there hadn’t previously been a library assistants program. And they started reading all of the “hybrid” books they could get their hands on - books that looked like journals, Origami Yoda, Hugo Cabret, the Marcel the Shell book where you can download a recording of Jenny Slate reading it in her Marcel voice. T-Rex Trying was a particular hit.

They were reading the Maryland Black Eyed Susan Book Award nominees, or some of them, but really all of the graphic novels. And another girl’s grandmother (this was a school for girls) found the librarian to tell her that this was the first year her granddaughter had ever liked reading. And the librarian felt very glad she’d decided to do the breakfast drawing game, and the kids did learn about databases, and how to cite using Noodletools, and where the books were on the shelf. Some of them even learned where to shelve them, and others got the librarian to order more and more comics for the graphic novel section, which now lived at the front of the library, twice the size it was the year before.

Oh, and another older girl read Fun Home, then gave it to a friend she thought might need to read it too, and from then on they both started using the library more. A senior had a gigglefit while reading Hyperbole and a Half during finals week. A kid wanted to understand eating disorders and asked the librarian for a book, even though she mostly only liked comics, and they were both surprised to find that Inside Out, Portrait of an Eating Disorder, when they opened it up, was full of drawings and comics and collage.

(from Honor Girl, by Maggie Thrash)

I think the story I'm telling you was made possible by pictures, by what happens brain-wise, when readers look at drawings and words together. It was also brought to us by the kind of “Hey, look at this! I’ll give it to you when I’m done” sharing that happens with comic book reading. If you could see the faces of the students involved, and read their funny dialogue, I think my point would be sharper, but I’ve tried drawing comics and frankly it’s too difficult for me.

So what do the panelists think about this whole images and text doing storytelling together thing? About their line, their drawing tools, the way a character arrives and is designed? I’d like to know how their comics got made, wouldn’t you? What if we draw our breakfast? What if we draw our notes? Will the panelists draw each other? Will someone make a joke about a “comics panel”? Keep in mind that these people created some of the books that the very same girls in this story literally wrestled over. Try not to do that at this session.

(Huevos Rancheros, from Relish by Lucy Knisley)

We live in an either/or world that prefers to put people into simple, separate boxes. But identity is fluid, not fixed, and books can help to reveal just how rich and complex our identities really are. 

Understanding intersectionality begins by examining one’s own identity. Privilege has enabled many in the dominant group(s) to avoid considering the multiple ways in which individuals can experience—and perpetuate—oppression. At the same time, the preference for “single-issue books” can limit an author’s ability to explore/expose the various, overlapping systems that create the unfair advantages and disadvantages that shape our lives.

Many authors are developing stories that engage intersectionality, yet those books are not always well received by reviewers who feel “burdened” by complex characters. Together we’ll discuss the strategies authors use to create authentic identities that resonate with readers. We’ll also share tips for reviewers who are ready to take “the next step” in evaluating diverse books.

Intersectionality: The Next Step in Diverse Books will be a round-table discussion between:

Mary Fan sci-fi/fantasy author, first-generation American, lifelong nerd, advocate for women in tech, and nobody's Asian trophy wife.

Dynamic twin bloggers and debut authors: Guinevere and Libertad Tomas of Twinja Book Reviews. What’s it like to both create and critique diverse speculative fiction for teens? How does being Afro-Latina inform their open-minded approach to all diverse representation?

And me, Zetta Elliott – middle-aged author, educator, scholar, immigrant, self-publisher, and fierce Black feminist advocate for greater diversity AND equity in kid lit.

Register today to join us for this engaging conversation about writing and reviewing books about the intersecting experiences of diversity!

Have we talked about the KidLitCon horror panel yet? No? We haven’t mentioned Mary Downing Hahn, Tracey Baptiste, and Ronald L. Smith in conversation with Karen Yingling of Ms Yingling Reads?

Shame on us! This is going to be an exciting panel - Mary is the author of such smart scary classics as Wait Til Helen Comes and All the Lovely Bad Ones, and most recently the heartstopping Took; Tracey has written the girl-powered Caribbean monster story The Jumbies; and Ron’s debut novel Hoodoo is about folk magic in 1950′s Alabama. God I love Southern Gothic.

And now we’re adding Dan Poblocki, whose contemporary chillers The Haunting of Gabriel Ashe, The Book of Bad Things, and his most recent, The House on Stone’s Throw Island, have been compared to Mary Downing Hahn’s work! Full circle! This conversation will play out Friday October 9 at 10am.

What’s Matthew Winner talking about in Episode 180 of the Let’s Get Busy podcast?? Why, it’s KidLitCon 2015, of course!

Get the inside info on our exhaustive search for the best hotel, the coolest restaurants, the smartest speakers. Find out how our program of sessions was assembled. And listen to Matthew’s A-DORABLE little boy playing with trucks in the background as his dad and Paula Willey talk shop.

Meet Dr. Ellen Prager - marine scientist, educator, and possessor of the coolest author photo ever. She’s coming to KidLitCon to talk about her middle grade series The Shark Whisperer.

As a special KLC bonus, the first thirty attendees to purchase The Shark Whisperer at the con will get a copy of the second book, Shark Rider free! Thanks, Mighty Media Press!

Dr. Prager is also the author of the grownup nonfiction book Sex, Drugs, and Sea Slime, so there is the possibility the Q&A for this section might get pretty frisky (hint: ask her what lobsters use as an aphrodisiac).

Due to exciting early registration numbers and a few generous sponsorships from publishers and bookstores, we are pleased to extend our Early Bird registration rate of $125 until September 20!

On September 21st, we’ll start calling it Last Minute Registration and conference registration will increase to $150. :)

The creators of Giants Beware! and Dragons Beware! have just been added to KidLitCon’s  How Graphic Novels Work panel. 

Brave Claudette and her tiny team are funny and full of energy - the colors and shapes are just so... juicy! And it’s nice how these characters subtly model and validate varied emotional responses to uncertainty and peril. 

Learn how these creators work together to create a tight pace and a fully realized world on Saturday October 10th at 10am.

Months of planning, cajoling, brainstorming and excellent teamwork have yielded two solid days of concentrated professional development goodness. And bowling.