2024 Events - YA & Middle Grade

Location: Haddon Ave. between Frazer & Lees Aves.

11:00 a.m.: Gae Polisner
6th Grade School Tie-in (Consider the Octopus)

8th Grade School Tie-in (The Memory of Things)

Gae Polisner is an award-winning author, a practicing lawyer, and an enthusiastic open-water swimmer. She has written two books for middle grade, Consider the Octopus and Seven Clues to Home, both with coauthor Nora Leigh Baskin. Her YA novels include Jack Kerouac is Dead to Me, The Pull of Gravity (Bank Street Award), and The Memory of Things.

12:00 p.m.: Erin Entrada Kelly
4th Grade School Tie-In (Maybe Marisol Rainey)

5th Grade School Tie -in (Hello, Universe )

7th Grade Tie-in (Those Kids from Fawn Creek)

Erin Entrada Kelly has received numerous awards and recognition for her work, including the 2018 Newbery Medal for Hello, Universe, a 2021 Newbery Honor for We Dream of Space, and the 2023 NAIBA Book of the Year Award for Those Kids from Fawn Creek. Her debut novel, Blackbird Fly, was named a best book of the year by Kirkus Reviews and School Library Journal and was an Asian/Pacific American Literature Honor Book. Her 2024 middle-grade novel, The First State of Being, received a starred review in Book Page.

Author Panels:

1:00 p.m.:

When History Sparks Fiction: Why Do We Write about It, and How?

Featuring: Gae Polisner (The Memory of Things), Darlene Beck Jacobson (Wheels of Change), Kate Szedga (Pharmacy Girl), Sarah Whitman (moderator, Collingswood Middle School Language arts Teacher)

2:00 p.m.:

Banned Books: Who Decides?

Featuring: Erin Entrada Kelly (Hello, Universe), Eric Smith (Don’t Read the Comments), Kimberly Kenna (Jett Jamison and the Secret Storm), Maria Andreu (Love in English), Rosemary Cline (moderator, Audiobook Narrator)

3:00 p.m.

How Technology Can Help Us Determine Why Certain Books Get Banned

This year’s Collingswood Book Festival includes a panel in the YA tent on book banning at 3 p.m. featuring the co-lead of Temple University Representation Lab, Alex Wermer-Colan. The lab is digitizing and text mining banned books in order to identify patterns such as adjectives commonly used to describe characters of color or dialogue based on gender identity.  The panel will include students involved in the project and will be moderated by Rosemary Cline. Panelists will discuss the process of their work as well as early findings. For more information on the project: https://tinyurl.com/2k64cr5p