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Love, Respect, and Celebration: The Legacy of Queer Literature

By |2020-08-19T01:15:44-05:00August 22nd, 2020|Categories: Archive, Author Guest Blog, Readers on Reading, Writers on Writing|Tags: , , , |

Caleb Roehrig has written several YA novels starring queer characters, including mystery, heist, and vampire novels. Buy them from one of the author's favorite indies, Literati Bookstore or The Book Cellar! by Caleb Roehrig In 2011, three and a half years before I wrote the manuscript that would become my debut novel, my husband and I put all of our belongings into storage and we moved to Helsinki, Finland. It was a world away from everything we knew, in an unfamiliar country where we didn’t speak the language, and where we had [...]

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We Can Be Heroes

By |2020-08-21T06:32:41-05:00August 21st, 2020|Categories: Archive, Author Guest Blog, Readers on Reading|Tags: , , |

This Summer, YA Pride has been running a pre-order campaign for three upcoming books by queer Black authors. The Summer of Everything is one of those books! We're at 11 pre-orders for it now, and would love to get to 25-- just 14 away! If you pre-order the book and tweet or email us proof of purchase (contact@yapride.org), we will add it to the count! by Julian Winters Growing up, I struggled with reading. I simply couldn’t get into the books assigned to me in class and rarely read [...]

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Teens Talk About LGBTQIAP+ YA: Part 1

By |2020-08-19T22:34:34-05:00August 21st, 2020|Categories: Archive, Readers on Reading, Teen Voices|Tags: , , , , , |

Earlier this year, we asked teens to tell us about the LGBTQIAP+ YA books that have touched their lives. This is our first round-up of those stories! We are so excited to be able to share these. Books can touch lives in unseen ways, something that is especially the case for LGBTQIAP+ YA books. We wanted to make some of those unseen experiences visible. This series of post is a reminder of why LGBTQIAP+ YA is so important, why it is so necessary for all of us to keep writing and advocating for these books. "Of Fire [...]

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Centering Friendship in YA Lit

By |2019-02-19T01:33:20-05:00February 19th, 2019|Categories: Guest Blogs, Readers on Reading|Tags: |

Aromantic Spectrum Awareness Week Series by Ashia Monet The power of friendship has always been one of my favorite tropes to read and write. Watching a group of strangers become lifelong friends is entertaining in its own right. Adding in the acknowledgement that accomplishing their goals is only possible through the love and trust they have for each other makes this a trope for the ages. Not only is it fun to see characters banter and play off of each other’s strengths, it is heartwarming to watch people learn to love each other platonically.   There’s a very [...]

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Trans Girl Classic Gets New Edition

By |2020-03-28T13:40:08-05:00January 25th, 2018|Categories: Archive, Author Interview, Readers on Reading, Writers on Writing|Tags: |

When Being Emily came out in 2012, it was the first YA novel to tell the story of a transgender girl from her perspective. This May, a new edition will be released with updated language and science, new scenes, a new author’s note and an introduction by poet and Harvard professor Stephanie Burt. To celebrate this upcoming edition, Being Emily author Rachel Gold and Stephanie Burt interviewed each other about the novel and related topics. We begin with questions for both of us and then devolve into Rachel sidetracking Stephanie to talk about comic books. (Which is really [...]

How Reading Got Me Through My Teens And Beyond

By |2020-03-28T13:40:11-05:00June 29th, 2017|Categories: Archive, Guest Blogs, Readers on Reading|Tags: , , |

Pride Month Blogathon: Day 13 – Introduction to Pride Month Blogathon by EC King Depression and anxiety have always run deeply in my veins. These issues are hereditary in my case and, though they are not my constant companions, they are definitely frequent visitors. Even though I was a privileged, seemingly happy and rambunctious child, I remember clearly the days or weeks when I felt a malaise that I didn’t know how to describe. I called it “being bored”, as I lay in bed staring listlessly out the window without even a book to keep me company, or as [...]

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“An Anchor to Guide Them”: On the Importance of LGBTQIA+ Media

By |2020-03-28T13:40:11-05:00June 10th, 2017|Categories: Archive, Guest Blogs, Readers on Reading, Writers on Writing|Tags: , , |

Pride Month Blogathon: Day 4 – Introduction to Pride Month Blogathon by Kiana Nguyen  I kissed my first girlfriend in 2011 when I was 18, and it was the first kiss that held my entire heart. I was excited, I was anxious, I was so happy to finally have them in my arms I felt close to bursting. I was so scared of finally feeling real that I wanted to run. Kissing Casey*, who later came out as genderqueer and trans, was an experience so unreal and so right, I felt starved for the joy that rushed through [...]

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Introduction to GayYA’s 2017 Blogathon

By |2020-03-28T13:40:14-05:00June 6th, 2017|Categories: Archive, Readers on Reading, Updates and Announcements, Writers on Writing|

What. A. Year. I began planning this blogathon the week after the U.S. election. Over the past six years, our blogathons have focused on general love of LGBTQIA+ YA, but this year, I knew that that would fall short. I was personally seeking something more, something that would help me grasp the world as it is now, and I figured many of our community members would be as well. This year, our blogathon explores two major themes: intergenerational conversation and the role that story plays in resistance, resilience, and joy. Over the last year, I’ve been struck by [...]

Finding the other story: disentangling love from the narrative

By |2020-03-28T13:40:14-05:00February 23rd, 2017|Categories: Guest Blogs, Readers on Reading, Writers on Writing|Tags: |

Aromantic Spectrum Awareness Week Series: Day 4 by Natalie Ritter (i) While considering all the ways I could approach writing something worthwhile about how being aro and reading stories intersect, I was reminded of an instance in a speculative fiction creative writing class I took in undergrad. When it came to sci-fi and fantasy, it quickly became clear that, in this entirely white and mostly male class, there were “rules” that my classmates expected (and almost demanded) of sci-fi and fantasy stories. In a sense, there was a “contract” that these readers brought to this genre, and they were [...]

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Aromantic Headcanons and Making Room for Friend-shipping

By |2020-03-28T13:40:14-05:00February 22nd, 2017|Categories: Author Guest Blog, Readers on Reading, Writers on Writing|

Aromantic Spectrum Awareness Week Series: Day 3 by Claudie Arseneault You know how ships go. Two people interact and have great chemistry, and suddenly fandom is all over them. They have a ship name that’s a mash-up of their two names, your tumblr dash is filled with them kissing and holding hands and being cuties, and the wild headcanons and alternate universes just keep coming. And why not? Look at them get along. They’re just perfect for each other, right? Here’s the thing: perfect for each other, for me, does not systematically mean romance. My experience of fandom [...]

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