During our Asexuality in YA series, we want to use our space on GayYA to support ace-spectrum voices. Last year, we decided to host Awareness Week Series over the various LGBTQIA+ Awareness Weeks throughout the year. Though we hope to include everyone on the site at all times, we wanted to dedicate a concentrated space to people from a specific community to talk about how they’re represented in YA. The response from the community was phenomenal– we got to feature many fantastic and thought-provoking posts, and watched as the community fostered some nuanced discussions via our identity-centric Twit Chats. I personally remember feeling amazed as I read the posts that were sent in and scrolled through the Twit Chat hashtag. I realized I wasn’t alone in my feelings of discontent regarding the representation of my identities, or my hopes for what that representation could look like in the future. I got to meet and connect with so many smart and passionate people.

So of course, we had to do the Awareness Week Series again.

Unfortunately, the dates for this year’s Asexual Awareness Week (Oct 23rd-29th) ended up never getting on our calendar. We’re so SO sorry for this mishap! We ran across this year’s dates two days ago. We debated trying to pull something together last minute, but since these weeks are driven by guest posts, we didn’t want to ask people to rush their work. We also have a number of resources we’re developing for libraries & bookstores, and want to take the time to get them done right! So we decided instead to reschedule and take the time to truly make a dedicated and purposeful space for an Asexuality in YA Series. So! Our Asexuality in YA series starts today.

This week we’ll feature several posts from various ace-spectrum contributors. We’ll also be discussing Ace YA all week long on the #AceYAChat hashtag. We’ll be posting prompts & questions, but please feel free to use it to talk about anything related to Ace YA Books!

If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, tweet us @thegayya or email me at vee@gayya.org

-Vee, admin and co-founder of GayYA