The National Book Foundation welcomed students to Symphony Space in New York City on the morning of November 18 for its annual Teens Read event. Eager students lined up outside in the brisk November cold for the opportunity to hear from this year’s finalists for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature.
Natalie Green, director of programs and partnerships at the National Book Foundation, welcomed students to the event. This year in the category of Young People’s Literature, a panel of judges sifted through 325 titles to highlight the 10 most notable works of the year for the longlist. The shortlisted nominees, selected from the longlist, are: A World Worth Saving by Kyle Lukoff; The Leaving Room by Amber McBride; The Teacher of Nomad Land: A World War II Story by Daniel Nayeri; Truth Is by Hannah V. Sawyerr; and (S)Kin by Ibi Zoboi, all books which earned starred reviews from PW.
Author Casey McQuiston took to the stage to share how literature had impacted their life. They began by discussing how they questioned if given their experience as a young reader in Louisiana they could relate to the audience of young readers from New York. But they found that the answer was yes, through the “one thing that all young readers are chasing, that we all have in common: endless possibility.”
McQuiston added, “As soon as I could understand what a story was, I knew two things. The first was that I wanted to create stories of my own, and the second was that stories could take me anywhere, including to worlds where I felt like I belonged.” They went on to note how writers such as Dorothy Parker and Oscar Wilde influenced their teen years (and joked that they were a “really cool, chill teenager who was invited to a lot of parties”), and how those writers offered them hope.
“Even when the world was overwhelming and the future was frightening, a good story was the one thing that made sense of everything else,” McQuiston said. “A book could be anything, but within that anything was tradition, a structure of expression and storytelling that became a cipher.”
An NBA Teaser
The finalists were introduced onstage by McQuiston to give a reading of their works to the raucous crowd of students. Lukoff kicked off the readings with a section from his middle grade book, which follows transgender tween A as they counter a golem intent on protecting trans kids. In the section Lukoff read from, protagonist A and friend Sal scour through the trash while speaking to a golem, who expresses how dangerous the world is without a safe space for children. “All I know is that now, if you say you don’t have a place to live, they call the cops, and then you either have to go home or go into a shelter, not a good one. There aren’t any good ones anymore.”
Next, McBride read from her novel in verse The Leaving Room, about Gospel, a teen in the afterlife who has become a Keeper, tasked with helping the dead transition. McBride’s excerpt explored the questions the protagonist has about her existence and soul in this new place. “I think I hear them, the violins and the clicking of pennies, which should be impossible, because this is a truth filled place, and Keepers can’t lie, because Keepers do not have souls like the living. Keepers are only atoms matter and some otherness. If you opened us up along our double stitch seams, I believe only fireflies would flutter out.”
Nayeri read from his historical middle grade novel The Teacher of Nomad Land, which takes place in 1941 Iran and follows 13-year-old Babak and younger sister Sana as they grieve the sudden loss of their father. “He sets the knife to the face of the stone. He scrapes the shape of the letter baa and the letter alif, together, they make the sound. Ba. It takes a long time. The edge of the knife grinds down into a dull, sad thing. He does it twice, Baba, Father. Are you practicing your letters on our father’s grave? ask Sana. ‘No,’ says Babak.”
Hannah V. Sawyerr’s reading from her sophomore novel in verse Truth Is touched on the complex relationship between 17-year-old Truth Bangura and her mother and her desire for agency over her own body. “Mama, this body gonna be somebody someday, this body will carry body one day when she’s ready, this body makes her own decisions. This body. Bang, this body blessed. This body broken. This body, this body, this body, beautiful.”
The last finalist to give her reading, Ibi Zoboi, shared from (S)kin, her YA novel in verse following Marisol, a soucouyant, or shapeshifter, who reminisces about the traumatic experience of undergoing an exorcism by her mother to remove the demon from her body. “Our new home with its thick walls and locked doors want me to be trapped in my skin, but I am fury and flame. I am a ravenous creature born out of war, and all I want to do right now is inhale life so that I can keep on living.”
Asked and Answered
Students lined up in the aisles of the auditorium, waiting for the opportunity to ask the finalists a question.
When asked about the title of her book, Zoboi explained that it was in reference to the book’s themes on family. “The S is in parentheses, and kin means family, and I don’t want to give too much away, but there is a very good reason why I choose to highlight the word in this book, and you’ll have to read to the end to find out why.”
A student asked McBride to explain what death means to her, and McBride shared that she doesn’t believe “death feels like a final thing.” As a Hoodoo practitioner, McBride said, “You care about your ancestors a lot. You talk with them. You still interact with them. So for me, death is just another step into whatever might be next.”
Sawyerr explained that the inspiration for her book was brought on by the words of a woman at a conference she attended. “I heard a woman say, ‘I would never be able to escape anything if I didn’t know how to love myself.’ And that was what made this book come alive for me. It became a book about a young person who loved herself enough to try to escape her circumstance. When I started writing this book, I really wanted to write about someone who hated their circumstances and just wanted to get out, but that really switched the narrative for me.”
Nayeri explained that the book’s concept came from research. “I was reading a lot of middle grade World War Two stories, and I was loving them. And I thought, ‘Man, that’s such a cool time. But also, it’s called World War Two. And I was like, was there anything going on in some of the parts of the world that maybe I hadn’t read about just yet?” After researching how the war impacted his country of origin, Iran, Nayeri was inspired. “All of a sudden, this idea of, what if the war in that particular place in the world really represented itself as one giant misunderstanding? One giant group of people who can’t speak to each other.”
For the final question, Lukoff was asked about whether he had participated in the tradition of creating his own golems, to which he said he hadn’t, but “in this case [of my book], the Golem shows up. It’s not created by the kid. But maybe I’ll try now!”
The morning closed with an autographing session, where students had the opportunity to chat with the authors and have their books signed.
