Archive – Page 10

Gay YA Agent Spotlight! #2 – Jim McCarthy

By Katie|2020-03-28T13:40:30-05:00October 13th, 2016|Categories: Archive, Publishing People|Tags: agent interview, agent spotlight, interview, jim mccarthy, querying, upcoming trends|

Welcome to our new series, Gay YA Agent Spotlight! Every Thursday, we'll be interviewing one agent about upcoming trends in LGBTQIA+ YA and MG, what they currently represent, and what they're looking for. 1. Hello! Thank you for participating in our Agent Spotlight series! We're excited to have you. Can you tell us how you got started agenting? Mine’s a bit of an unusual story. I had completed my freshman year at NYU and already blown through all the money I had saved for college (NYC is EXPENSIVE), so I needed a job stat. I sent out 40 [...]

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Call for Selection Team Members

By Vee|2020-03-28T13:40:30-05:00October 4th, 2016|Categories: Archive, Updates and Announcements|

Are you an avid reader of LGBTQIA+ YA? Do you have ThoughtsTM about the representation of LGBTQIA+ youth? Are you interested in helping GayYA.Org decide which LGBTQIA+ YA books to recommend, review, and promote? We are thrilled to announce that we are seeking 5 new members for our Selection Team. GayYA’s Selection Team is a group of people who help GayYA decide which books to recommend, review, and help promote. GayYA gets dozens of review requests a month. We are unable to keep up with reading all the books! That’s where you come in. We’re looking for people [...]

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Interview: Anna-Marie McLemore, author of When The Moon Was Ours

By Vee|2020-03-28T13:40:30-05:00October 3rd, 2016|Categories: Archive, Author Interview, Book Club, New Releases, Writers on Writing|Tags: Latinx, Magical Realism, PoC, Speculative, Trans|

When I (Vee) was at BEA this Summer, I had the marvelous opportunity to meet and interview Anna-Marie McLemore. We had been chatting about trans & queer YA for a few months on Twitter, so it was LOVELY to be able to meet her in person. Her book When the Moon Was Ours (which is releasing tomorrow!!), is SO amazing ya'll. AND it's our #GayYABookClub read this month, so I have the perfect excuse to make you all read it immediately. :D When the Moon Was Ours follows two characters through a story that has multicultural elements and [...]

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Interview: E.M. Kokie, author of RADICAL

By Vee|2020-03-28T13:40:31-05:00October 2nd, 2016|Categories: Archive, Author Interview, New Releases|Tags: Coming Out, lesbian, Queer Girls, Rural|

While I was at ALA, I (Vee) had the chance to meet and interview the fantastic E.M. Kokie. E.M. Kokie is the author of Radical, Personal Effects, and has stories in the Violent Ends anthology as well as the Things I'll Never Say: Stories About Our Secret Selves anthology. I had a fabulous time interviewing her-- we chatted for about a half hour, and talked about diversity within LGBTQIA+ YA, survivalist groups, how the experience of being queer is different depending on class & location, and writing books that ask more questions than they answer. I felt like we [...]

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Bi YA Reads Bookmarks

By Vee|2020-03-28T13:40:34-05:00September 28th, 2016|Categories: Archive, Fun Things, Teachers & Librarians|Tags: Bisexual|

Introducing.....Bi YA Reads bookmarks! What: rad double-sided bookmarks with 15 of our fave Bi YA books. Who: anyone is free to use/print these out! Why: Our main goal for these was to develop a resource that librarians and booksellers can put in their teen section. Bookmarks and other hand outs are a great way to spread knowledge of inclusive books, sometimes even more so than displays. While displays are incredibly important, teens who aren't out may not feel comfortable browsing them. Bookmarks ensure that these teens can be informed & request these books privately, or find an ebook version. In [...]

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Blog Tour & Giveaway: Not Your Sidekick by C.B. Lee

By Shelly|2020-03-28T13:40:34-05:00September 20th, 2016|Categories: Archive, Author Interview, Book Club, Fun Things, New Releases|Tags: Asian, Bisexual, Intersectionality|

Today we're very lucky to have C.B. Lee answering a few questions about Not Your Sidekick for the official blog tour! All of us at GayYA are SO EXCITED for this book! Hi C.B., thank you for agreeing to this interview. Tell us a little about yourself, your background, and your current book. Hello there! Thank you for having me here today. I'm C.B., a bisexual woman who grew up on the California coast. I'm a first generation Asian American and am very excited to introduce more characters whose backgrounds are like my own. My current novel is Not Your [...]

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GayYA Recommends Interview + Giveaway: Georgia Peaches and Other Forbidden Fruit by Jaye Robin Brown

By Vee|2020-03-28T13:40:34-05:00August 29th, 2016|Categories: Archive, Author Interview, Book Club, New Releases|Tags: contemporary, lesbian, Realistic, Religion, Romance, Rural|

Our newest GayYA Recommends title is Georgia Peaches and Other Forbidden Fruit by Jaye Robin Brown. (That means it's our next #GayYABookClub read, too!) Georgia Peaches hits shelves tomorrow (8/30) but we still have an ARC & some awesome swag! So we're doing a flash giveaway. How to enter: Share one reason you're excited about Georgia Peaches via the #GayYABookClub hashtag. Multiple reasons mean multiple entries, so tweet as many times as you like! A winner will be randomly selected tonight (8/29) at 10pm CST. If you don't win a copy, buy yours at a local store tomorrow, or request [...]

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Interview: Liz Kessler, author of Read Me Like a Book

By Vee|2020-03-28T13:40:34-05:00August 25th, 2016|Categories: Archive, Author Interview, New Releases, Writers on Writing|

I got the chance to interview Liz Kessler, author of the YA novel Read Me Like A Book, and the two middle-grade series Emily Windsnap and, Phillipa's Fairy Godsister. Read Me Like A Book is, in Liz's words, about "a girl going from her last boyfriend to her first girlfriend via a major crush on her English teacher." We're so excited this book is being published in the US! Thank you so much to Holly for transcribing this video! Check out Holly's fantastic blog here, and follow her on Twitter @CatchTheseWords. Vee: What was the original impetus for [...]

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On the Queer Trans Experience: Because Sometimes Just One Letter Ain’t Enough

By Vee|2020-03-28T13:40:35-05:00June 30th, 2016|Categories: Archive, Author Guest Blog, Blogathon 2016, Writers on Writing|Tags: Queer Girls, Realistic, Trans|

by Meredith Russo One of the things most often praised about my book If I Was Your Girl isn’t the book itself, but the author’s note at the end (or the beginning, depending on if you’re reading the ARC or the final print) where I lay out my hope that cis people won’t take Amanda’s rather normative story as a set of rules trans people must follow and, more importantly for this post, where I admit that I had to make some concessions so the story would be more palatable for them. Let’s talk about those concessions, because [...]

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Interview: Vee sits down with David Levithan & Nina Lacour

By Vee|2020-03-28T13:40:35-05:00June 29th, 2016|Categories: Archive, Author Interview, Blogathon 2016, Book Club, Fun Things, New Releases, Teen Voices|Tags: Coming Out, gay, lesbian, Minor Queer Characters, New Releases, Poetry, Queer Girls, Queer Guys, Realistic, Representation|

I had the INCREDIBLE opportunity to be able to sit down with David Levithan & Nina Lacour when they came to Addendum Books on the You Know Me Well book tour. This was literally one of the best experiences of my life and I am so thankful to the authors for taking the time to do this and to everyone else who had a hand in making this possible. We got to talk about the new narratives You Know Me Well brings to the table of LGBTQIA+ YA, how the collaboration on YKMW began, and what its existence [...]

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