I am so excited for this upcoming FREE festival! It will be my third time attending and my second time helping out at this fantastic event. Each year I'm blown away at the number of authors who come and this there is another AWESOME line up!
WHO: The Austin Public Library Friends Foundation
WHEN: Saturday, October 1, 2011
10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
WHERE: Palmer Events Center, 900 Barton Springs, Austin, TX 78704
COST: Free
Twitter: @AustinTBF @APLFF
Austin Public Library Friends Foundation Announces
Panels, Entertainment, ‘Infinite Playlist’ Screening for Austin Teen Book Fest
Third Year Projected to Bring Austin to Largest of Similar Events in U.S.
AUSTIN, Texas—The Austin Public Library Friends Foundation (APLFF)—established to increase private support for the Austin Public Library’s collections, programs, and facilities— today announces new details of the third annual Austin Teen Book Festival on October 1.
On Friday, September 30th at 10 pm, Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar will screen “Nick & Nora’s Ultimate Playlist” with a Q&A featuring festival author David Levithan, co-author of the book on which the film was based. BookPeople will be selling signed copies of his books in the lobby. Levithan is a young-adult fiction editor and award-winning author. His first book, Boy Meets Boy, was published in 2003. Other titles include Every You, Every Me and this year’s The Lover's Dictionary. The screening benefits the APLFF.
The festival is also revealing their steam punk theme—a nod to keynote speaker Scott Westerfeld. Accordingly, the entertainment will be courtesy of Delirium of Grandeur and the band Darwin Prophet.
Celebrating the teen reading experience, the festival will feature nearly thirty of the most popular and critically acclaimed young adult fiction authors in the country. Free and open to the public, the 2011 Austin Teen Book Festival will be held at the Palmer Events Center. There are five programmed panels (each will be held three times). They include:
PEN FATALE features Gabrielle Zevin (All These Things I've Done), Mary Pearson (The Fox Inheritance), Jessica Brody (My Life Undecided), Alyson Noel (Everlasting), and Alexandra Adornetto (Hades); moderated by Margo Rabb (Cures for Heartbreak).
ALTERNAWORLDS (fantasy) features Scott Westerfeld (Goliath), Maureen Johnson (Name of the Star), Jonathan Maberry (Dust & Decay), and Brian Yansky (Alien Invasion); moderated by Rosemary Clement-Moore (The Splendor Falls).
REAL LIFE IS MESSY (edgy fiction) features John Corey Whaley (Where Things Come Back), David Levithan (Every You, Every Me), Melissa Walker (Small Town Sinners), Coe Booth (Bronxwood), and Geoff Herbach (Stupid Fast); moderated by Varian Johnson (Saving Maddie).
I HEART LOVE STORIES (realistic/romance fiction) features Simone Elkeles (Perfect Chemistry), Stephanie Perkins (Lola & the Boy Next Door), Jenny Han (We’ll Always Have Summer), Jennifer Zeigler (Sass & Sensibility), and Christina Mandelski (The Sweetest Thing); moderated by Cristina Garcia (Dreams of Significant Girls).
SUPERNATURAL SUSPENSE (fantasy) features Heather Brewer (Vladimir Tod), Jackson Pearce (Sweetly), Tera Lynn Childs (Sweet Venom), Sophie Jordan (Vanish), and Andrea Cremer (Wolfsbane); moderated by Cynthia Leitich Smith (Blessed).
The festival, which expects well over 2,000 attendees this year, will feature Texas born and raised author Scott Westerfeld as the keynote speaker (@scottwesterfeld). Author of five science fiction novels for adults and three series of novels for young adults, Westerfeld is most notably known for his books Peeps, So Yesterday, which were both named Best Books for Young Adults by the American Library Association, as well as his Leviathan series, and Uglies series.
Westerfeld joins a list of other celebrated authors who will be participating in this year’s festival including central Texans Margo Rabb, Cristina Garcia, Varian Johnson and Cynthia Leitich Smith who will moderate several themed panel discussions throughout the one-day event. Panel genres include fantasy and science fiction, romance and realism, edgy and pen fatale.
This year, APLFF hopes to continue to increase the number of participants by partnering with local librarians to reach kids in the city who may not have otherwise been aware of the festival. Many teachers citywide have also agreed to offer their students extra credit as a way of encouraging them to attend the festival.
For more information, please visit the Austin Teen Book Festival’s website at www.austinteenbookfestival.com
About BookPeople
BookPeople was founded in 1970 and, over the years, has become the center of Austin's literary landscape. BookPeople hosts hundreds of author signings each year and supports hundreds of local non-profits, schools and libraries. BookPeople was a founding partner of the Austin Teen Book Festival and plans to continue to lend its support to making this the premier teen book festival in the country.
About the Austin Public Library Friends Foundation
The Austin Public Library Friends Foundation supports the Austin Public Library by increasing public awareness about the Library and its importance to the community, and by raising funds to enhance Library collections, programs, and facilities. Many of APLFF’s programs, including the Mayor's Book Club, The New Fiction Confab, Raise a Reader and many others are devoted to literacy, reading, and increasing the entire community’s access to information and knowledge.
This program is made possible in part by a grant from Humanities Texas, the state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
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About the Moderators
Rosemary Clement-Moore—Moderator of the ALTERNAWORLDS panel
Clement-Moore has been writing stories all her life, even when she should have been doing other things, like studying Algebra. She worked in theatre for years, and now she is writing full time, which is her dream job, because she “gets to work in her pajamas and take a break every afternoon to play Guitar Hero.” Her books include Texas Gothic, The Splendor Falls, Prom Dates From Hell, Hell Week, and Highway to Hell.
Margo Rabb – Moderator of the PEN FATALE panel
Margo Rabb's stories have been published in The Atlantic Monthly, Zoetrope: All Story, Seventeen, Best New American Voices, New Stories from the South, New England Review, One Story, and elsewhere, and have been broadcast on National Public Radio. She received grand prize in the Zoetrope short story contest, first prize in The Atlantic Monthly fiction contest, first prize in the American Fiction contest, and a PEN Syndicated Fiction Project Award. She grew up in Queens, New York, and recently moved to Austin, Texas with her husband and daughter. A complete list of her published work can be found here.”
Cristina Garcia – Moderator of the I HEART LOVE STORIES panel
Garcia is the author of five novels: Dreaming in Cuban, The Agüero Sisters, Monkey Hunting, A Handbook to Luck, and The Lady Matador’s Hotel, recently published by Scribner. García has edited two anthologies, Cubanísimo: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Cuban Literature and Bordering Fires: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Mexican and Chicano/a Literature. Two works for young readers, The Dog Who Loved the Moon, and I Wanna Be Your Shoebox were published in 2008. A collection of poetry, The Lesser Tragedy of Death, was published in 2010. Her newest work, Dreams of Significant Girls, is a young adult novel set in a Swiss boarding school in the 1970s.
García’s work has been nominated for a National Book Award and translated into fourteen languages. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, and an NEA grant, among others. Recently, Garcia was a Visiting Professor at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas-Austin and teaches at Texas Tech University most spring semesters. This fall, Garcia will be a Visiting Professor at the University of Miami and will serve as University Chair in Creative Writing at Texas State University-San Marcos from 2012-14.”
Varian Johnson – moderating the REAL LIFE IS MESSY panel
Varian Johnson is the author of Saving Maddie (Delacorte / Random House, 2010), My Life as a Rhombus (Flux / Llewellyn, 2008) and A Red Polka Dot in a World Full of Plaid (Genesis Press, 2005). He was born and raised in Florence, South Carolina, and attended the University of Oklahoma, where he received a BS in Civil Engineering. Varian later attended the Vermont College of Fine Arts, where he received an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults.
Varian now lives in Austin, TX with his wife, Crystal, and is a member of SCBWI, the Writers’ League of Texas, and The Assembly on Literature for Adolescents (ALAN). Varian is also the co-founder of The Brown Bookshelf, an online community charged with highlighting established and up-and-coming African-American authors of children’s and young adult literature.” @VarianJohnson
Cynthia Leitich Smith – moderating the SUPERNATURAL SUSPENSE panel
Cynthia Leitich Smith is the New York Times and Publishers Weekly best-selling author of Eternal, Tantalize, and Blessed (Candlewick). Tantalize was honored at the 2007 National Book Festival, named a Top Ten Pick on YALSA's Popular Paperbacks list, and The Horn Book called it "an intoxicating romantic thriller." A graphic novel adaptation of the book is in the works. Eternal was also a YALSA Teens Top Ten nominee, featured at the Texas Book Festival, and Publishers Weekly said, "…readers should be hooked by this fully formed world, up through the action-packed finale." It debuted at #5 on the New York Times best-seller list and #13 on the Publishers Weekly best-seller list. Blessed was cheered by The Horn Book Magazine as "A hearty meal for the thinking vampire reader." Kirkus Reviews calls the world, "wild and ultimately fascinating" and says of Quincie and Kieren, "...the pages fairly smolder in describing their attraction to one another." @ CynLeitichSmith
*post information is quoted from an email sent from David Wyatt
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I am SO excited about this! A few of the Htown girls and I are going to get their Friday night, so we're rested and pumped up for Saturday. We all must rendezvous and high five or something, lol!
ReplyDeleteYAY!!! I'm so glad you guys are coming! I can't wait to see you guys. YES, we'll definitely have to meet up on Saturday.
ReplyDeleteI just checked out their website and it really does look amazing! I wish I lived closer to Texas. :( I might have to put this on my list of events to check out next year!
ReplyDeleteOh man this looks like an incredible event. Wish I lived in the area....
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