Calling all teens!

We have another exciting lineup of YA authors, this year more diverse than ever before. All YA sessions will be indoors — from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. — but free for everyone 18 and under. We have a special surprise in store. We’ll still have the panels and interviews you love, but this year you’ll be running the show. Our moderators and interviewers will be local teens!

Teens are in for a treat with an incredible lineup of young adult authors including Anna-Marie McLemore (Blanca y Roja) and Zoraida Córdova, author of Bruja Born, named an NPR Top YA Book and heralded as “a richly Latin American, giddily exciting novel” by the New York Times.

Lee Wind will present his LBGTQ novel Queer as a Five-Dollar Bill, inspired by real historical evidence that Abraham Lincoln was in love with another man, in a panel on controversy in YA literature.

Bay Area public high schools have seen a huge spike in the enrollment of refugee youth in the last four years, many of them arriving as asylum-seekers fleeing violence in Central America. What is it like to come of age amidst the trauma of war and displacement? Foreign correspondent and Afghan refugee Atia Abawi’s A Land of Permanent Goodbyes follows Tareq, a teenage boy who flees war-torn Syria with his family and explores the universal experience of losing and seeking home.

The world-famous Literary Death Match comes to Young Adults for the first time ever! This competitive, humor-centric reading series pits famous and emerging authors against one another to prove literature is a brilliant, unstoppable, and undeniably fun medium. It’s hosted by the indefatigable Adrian Todd Zuniga. Stay tuned for the authors to be featured.

In collaboration with Oakland International High School, refugee youth featured in the new anthology I Am Home will share personal narratives of identity-formation, healing, and belonging.

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