My Readercon schedule

I’m super excited to be going to Readercon (www.readercon.org) for the first time! It’s a fun convention for people who love books, and it takes place in the Boston/Burlington, MA area from 11 to 14 July. Four whole days of talking to awesome people, eating good food, thinking about books, and generally having a blast! Some friends I can’t wait to see again, and others I’ll be meeting for the first time.

Here’s my schedule, in case you’re in the area. Hope to see you!

SATURDAY, JULY 13

10:00 AM F To YA or Not to YA. Jordan Hamessley, E.C. Myers, Phoebe North, Charles Oberndorf, Veronica Schanoes (leader), Shveta Thakrar. There are plenty of adult books with teen heroes, like Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex and Lev Grossman’s The Magicians. Some books that were not aimed at teens when they came out are mostly read by them today, like Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game. Some books are marketed as YA in one country and adult in another. So what makes a book “a YA book”? Do we just know it when we see it, or is there a way to pin this down beyond listening to marketing campaigns?

SUNDAY, JULY 14

12:00 PM G Writing for Younger Readers. Lisa Janice (LJ) Cohen, Jordan Hamessley, Alaya Dawn Johnson, E.C. Myers (leader), Phoebe North, Shveta Thakrar. How do middle grade (MG) and young adult (YA) authors and editors write for children and teen readers? How do they make science fiction more accessible for kids, build complex fantasy worlds, and develop authentic characters with diverse backgrounds? This panel is ideal for anyone writing MG or YA or interested in finding books with plots as rich and complex as any novel targeted to adult readers.

Proposed by E.C. Myers.

2:00 PM G Teen Violence, Teen Sex. Steve Berman, Gwendolyn Clare, Jack M. Haringa (leader), Donald G. Keller, Phoebe North, Shveta Thakrar. As seen in bestsellers like The Hunger Games and The Daughter of Smoke and Bone, today’s literary teen heroes, and especially its heroines, are more likely to commit violence than to have sex. Coming of age and coming into your own is often marked in YA spec fic by survival and destruction rather than sexual awakening. How is the exploration of violence in books related to consensual sexual exploration, and cultural anxieties and mores around it, in real teens’ lives?