On March 5–6, thousands of virtual attendees flocked to YouTube for the seventh annual North Texas Teen Book Festival, hosted by Texas’s Irving Public Library and presented this year by HarperCollins’s Epic Reads and Shelf Stuff. More than 90 authors participated in keynotes and panels, which were available to viewers worldwide. The preceding Ed Day: On Demand offered a professional development training symposium for local educators and librarians.
Food-Centered Titles Whet the Palate
“Sweet and Salty Love” featured National Book Award winner Elizabeth Acevedo (With the Fire on High, Quill Tree) and debut authors Laekan Zea Kemp (Somewhere Between Bitter and Sweet, Little, Brown), Loan Le (A Phở Love Story, Simon & Schuster), and Jennifer Yen (A Taste for Love, Razorbill). Latinx Bookstagrammer Carmen of Tomes and Textiles served as moderator.
After introductions, Carmen offered an icebreaker, asking the panelists which food or meal best represents their novel. Acevedo kicked off the discussion, saying, “It would have to be a spread on a Lazy Susan,” because of the range of her novel’s components; if it had to be a singular dish, it’d be Sancocho, a Dominican stew. Yen spotlighted boba, saying that the tea and tapioca drink exemplifies the “fun and interesting” blend of Taiwanese and American culture she hopes the book provides. Selecting her protagonist’s signature coconut cake, Kemp spoke about its personal significance; coconut is “[Kemp’s] favorite dessert flavor” since she grew up sharing it with her grandfather. Finally, Le chose cơm gà, a comforting meal of rice with chicken; she believes it perfectly represents the underlying depth of the immigrant story in her Vietnamese American rom-com.
Carmen then initiated individual questions, asking Kemp to speak about her protagonist Pen’s dream to open a pastelería next door to her father’s restaurant. Kemp highlighted how the novel is really “about a girl seeking her father’s approval and wanting to carry on his legacy.” Food, then, serves as an “emotional touchstone between Pen and her father,” as well as representing “Latinx creators’ proximity to our roots” since “we are always building on what came before.”
Le concurred with Kemp in naming food as an emotional touchstone in her own novel featuring competing family restaurants, adding, “When I think of food, I think of family.”
Acevedo, meanwhile, spoke about the impetus to make heroine Emoni a chef. Acevedo revealed that she didn’t start with a specific theme in mind; as a “pantser,” she “write[s] to discover.” The show Chopped and the novel Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel provided her with inspiration before National Novel Writing Month in 2013. “I don’t know, I’m just obsessed with food,” Acevedo concluded with a laugh.
Finally, Yen unveiled the development of her book’s reality show mashup premise. She confessed that she doesn’t watch The Bachelor or The Bachelorette; Mrs. Bennet in Pride & Prejudice, one of her favorite Jane Austen novels, inspired Yen’s protagonist’s mother’s meddling matchmaking behavior. Yen also noted her love for the precision of baking, and the influence of The Great British Bake Off because of the contestants’ politeness and frequent youthfulness.
Carmen next turned the conversation to cultural identity, starting with Kemp. “As a mixed race Chicana and transracial adoptee, my identity is pretty complex,” Kemp explained. But just as important as her exploration of being Latinx, she continued, are her conversations on mental health, as mental illness bears stigma in the Latinx community.
As for Le, Carmen asked about elements of Vietnamese American identity that she sees as being policed by gatekeepers. Le identified the common Asian American trope of wanting—or being forced—to go into STEM fields; in her book, she wanted to subvert expectations by showing Vietnamese American characters who pursue alternative paths for their own happiness.
Yen then answered which elements of Taiwanese culture she found important to incorporate. Overall, she wanted to explore “acculturation and difficulties that [Asian Americans and people of color] struggle with as diaspora,” as well as immigrant and intergenerational difficulties. However, she made sure to distinguish Liza as Taiwanese instead of Chinese, hoping to show the “little cultural differences that really set them apart.”
Other topics included exploring identity in prose vs. verse, writing and publishing, and impactful educators in the authors’ lives.
Community, Worldbuilding, and Identity in Fantasy
“Final Fantasy”, moderated by Sydnie Shreffler, featured authors Hafsah Faizal (We Hunt the Flame, FSG), Jordan Ifueko (Raybearer, Amulet), Darcie Little Badger (Elatsoe, illus. by Rovina Cai, Levine Querido), and Newbery Honoree Megan Whalen Turner (Return of the Thief, Greenwillow) in conversation.
After introductions—including revealing their favorite doughnut—Shreffler asked Ifueko and Little Badger to speak to their experiences debuting during the pandemic. Ifueko mentioned how her publisher moved her launch date from spring to summer; while she was upset to not publish with many of her debut siblings, she called herself lucky, because by the time her book released, “people were used to online events and festivals.” Ifueko also discussed her anxiety during that period, as well as the concurrence of the Black Lives Matter protests; although publishing and hitting the New York Times bestseller list should feel like a significant milestone, she said there “are a lot of blank spots [in my memory of the time]. I was under a lot of pressure.” Similarly, Little Badger held more concern for her family than her publishing debut; when she sold her novel around the end of 2019, her father was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He died during the pandemic, which was difficult to navigate as the healthcare system was overwhelmed. However, Little Badger shared that an online community of LGBTQ+ speculative fiction writers donated to the Carl Brandon Society in his name. While her debut year has been tough, she has “also experienced the great strength of community.”
Faizal described the difficulty of writing sequels, the delay in We Hunt the Flame’s release, and how she felt she’s “not ready to say goodbye” after concluding her duology, though the world of her next duology, starting with A Tempest of Tea, “is set in a universe that is expanding from Arawiya.” Turner shared how “very surreal” it feels completing her series after 20 years. She called the book launch “one huge worldwide party for me” as her fans span generations and were able to congregate online.
Ifueko and Little Badger talked about the research process behind writing culturally based fantasy worlds. Ifueko identified the difficulty in researching her own background, as many of the academic texts about West Africa that are currently accessible are “written by colonizers.” Little Badger gave kudos to how she was raised: her mother is the director of policy for their Lipan Apache tribe, and her family has always valued the preservation of their cultural heritage.
[The next question focused on pressure to fulfill diversity quotas. Ifueko said that including all 13 culturally distinct places in her novel “seemed like the most natural thing in the world to me.” As the self-described oldest panelist, Turner said her childhood reading options featured even less diversity than Ifueko’s. There were only “very Eurocentric” options such as J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Susan Cooper, so she set out to write cultures that readers would feel familiarity with, without it being a retread or retelling. “There’s always a tension between your desire to stick every historical thing you know is true into your fiction,” Turner mused, but one should recognize that history is sometimes terrible and should not, and doesn’t have to, be replicated.
Little Badger subsequently spoke about establishing a balance between incorporating important real-world issues, such as Native displacement and climate change, and avoiding personally painful history or writing solely Native tragedy.
Faizal discussed subconsciously writing in a lush, evocative style; she believes “it’s part of being from this culture”—Faizal’s parents are from Sri Lanka and “ancestrally we’re from the Middle East”—“in which storytelling is so important and such a big part of our lives.”
Finally, Turner explained how her plot twists work by using “that power of conventional thinking” and subverting readers’ expectations.
Keynotes on Women’s Empowerment, Race, and Extinction
Library science professor and NTTBF co-founder Dr. Rose Brock moderated a women-centered discussion between She Persisted series (Philomel) authors Atia Abawi (She Persisted: Sally Ride), Lesa Cline-Ransome (She Persisted: Claudette Colvin), and bestselling author, Scholastic v-p and executive editor Andrea Davis Pinkney (She Persisted: Harriet Tubman), with series creator Chelsea Clinton. Clinton said, “Picture books are the way we often say to children, ‘Here’s what possible, or here’s what’s not; here’s where you’re visible, or here’s where you aren’t.’ ” She highlighted her gratitude in getting to play a small part in “shifting what we’re saying to kids is possible, is valued and is valuable.”
National Book Award winner Dr. Ibram X. Kendi and National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature Jason Reynolds were in conversation, with Brock serving as moderator. The duo spoke to the adaptation process behind Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You: A Remix of the National Book Award-Winning Stamped from the Beginning (Little, Brown). After Reynolds initially declined Kendi’s request to adapt his nonfiction adult book a few times, Reynolds relented. Now, Reynolds says he is ultimately grateful he did, as he is aware that “this might be the biggest contribution to the conversation around race for kids that I ever make.” The difficult part in crafting an accessible adaptation, Reynolds said, was incorporating Kendi’s nonnegotiable aspects and determining the answer to the question, “How do you take a masterpiece and try to make another from it?”
The One and Only Katherine Applegate
Brock chatted with Newbery Medalist Katherine Applegate about her Endling trilogy (HarperCollins). Applegate divulged her inspiration behind the middle grade epic fantasy, her discovery of the word “endling”—“the last known individual of a species or subspecies”—and expressed her thoughts on the importance of found family. “When you’re sorting through who you want to be and don’t always feel like you quite fit with your relatives,” she said, you seek out friends who “celebrate and help you redefine who you are.” She also shared about her Newbery-winning novel, The One and Only Ivan, and anthropomorphizing animals in fiction.
