Another Week of Many Book Events

Contrary to what the title of this post would suggest, it wasn't so much a week as it was a weekend. Last weekend to be specific. Yes, the three events I attended were crammed into an approximately 30 hour period. (Not spread out over one whole week).

Last Friday, I took a brief break from moving into my temporary summer housing to trek downtown with Mitali from Alley of Books. We arrived slightly late to the Diversity in YA panel, where we were saved from having to stand the entire time by a sympathetic Malinda Lo.

For those of you not familiar with the Diversity in YA, it's a website and series of events organized by authors Malinda Lo and Cindy Pon basically to talk about and promote diversity in fiction. Friday's panel consisted of authors Chris Beam, David Levithan, Malinda Lo, and Jacqueline Woodson and was moderated by Cindy Pon.

panelists Malinda Lo, Chris Beam, Jacqueline Woodson and David Levithan and moderator Cindy Pon

The panel was a lot of fun, and, of course, I got to chat with some pretty cool people, most notably the Community Manager of Book Country (a relatively new online writing community of epic proportions), another very cool person who will only be 8 floors above me this summer while I'm at my internship, as well as Malinda Lo.

Then, on Saturday, I made my way down to Books of Wonder for Diversity in YA's second NYC event. The panel was about twice the size than that of the day before, including Matt de la Peña, Malinda Lo, Kekla Magoon, Neesha Meminger, Cindy Pon, Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich, and Jacqueline Woodson. The panel was a little lengthy, if I dare say so, but there were a lot of important topics covered. I'd say that attending these two Diversity in YA events has definitely given me a little more perspective on the relationship between diversity and the publishing industry.

in which you can barely see panelists Jacqueline Woodson, Kekla Magoon, Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich, Malinda Lo, Neesha Meminger, Cindy Pon, and Matt de la Peña

Aside from all the wonderful panelists, I had the pleasure of seeing Kelsey from The Book Scout, Steph from Steph Su Reads, as well as author Lindsay Leavitt, among others.

After the wonderfulness of Diversity in YA, I made me way to Brooklyn for a book signing for Alyssa Sheinmel. This was a much smaller and quieter event than the aforementioned ones, but it was still just as enjoyable. Alyssa read two sections from her newest novel, The Lucky Kind, answered some questions from the audience (primarily from her sister Courtney Sheinmel), and then signed books.

Alyssa Shienmel reads from The Lucky Kind

And that was my week(end) of fantastic book events!