Is anyone else going to ALAN/NCTE? I’ll be there this year, my first conference since! I’ll get my bivalent booster this week, doing what I can to prepare myself. I’m looking forward to immersing myself in the thoughts, movements, and trends relating to young adult literature. I’ll be attending just in time to prepare for the course I’ll be teaching at Indiana University at Indianapolis next spring semester. I’m looking forward to the class. It feels like I’m preparing a learning experience that will challenge my students to think and engage in the world with purpose. I’ve been struck by concepts from Craft in the Real World by Matthew Salesses and Kara Keeling’s ideas on the stewardship and care of cultural objects as introduced to me by Dr. Daphne Brooks. So, I’m looking at those YA books that express forms of care; that innovate and blaze new trails; and that exist as expressions of genius. This innovation comes from within marginalized, non-western communities that seem disruptive to some but not to those from where the stories, the language and the rhythms originate. I feel like I could read for 20 more years to prep this, but I have to shake off the imposter syndrome and grow this concept with my students.

I’m looking forward to exploring many facets of books and literacy, particularly class. Let’s disrupt the perpetual notion of generational poverty in marginalized communities!! So, I’m working to find those YA books that explore with economically privileged characters as well as the economically challenged. This is a topic that rarely works its way into YA literature. I think I’ll ask students to choose from Hearts Unbroken; Piecing Me Together; This is My Brain in Love; Into the Wild Light, and Into White.

I continue to follow the news as it relates to book censorship and would really like to read where we liberals are getting ahead of some of this legislative action; perhaps where we’ve figured out how to successfully mobilize at local levels and keep the books on the shelf.

Next Tuesday, 25 Oct. at 7pmET/6pmCT, I’ll have the pleasure of meeting author Joanna Jo when #ABCCD discusses The Silence That Binds Us. I hope you can join us! Here’s the link to register

https://illinois.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZUpdOmprD0tGdAC6HAaQDAxoZ97ReZKErk-