This morning, I’m in Connecticut, preparing to present at Connecticut Library Association Conference. I’m so thrilled to have been invited, and I’m even more excited to be given the floor to talk about two of my favorite topics: reader’s advisory and contemporary YA fiction.

While I think most of the information here is useful to all readers, those who attended either or both of my sessions will benefit from having heard what some of the information is in context of the bigger discussion. But either way, I thought these would be good resources for any reader interested in either or both topics.

Because I didn’t feel like keeping things consistent, I decided to present on one topic through a Google slideshow and the other through Prezi. Both are embedded below and should be pretty straightforward in their use.

Not Your Mother’s Teen RA


For this discussion, I dove deep into talking about how we can be better readers advisors for teens by being more aware of the digital resources out there for us to take advantage of. You can see the entire presentation at this link.

I believe the notes field is also visible, which is where I pulled some of my sources for further digging. The presentation is chock full of links for further reading, as well, including loads of inspirational sites for making, borrowing, and being inspired by other people’s RA savvy. At the very end, I’ve given some tips for how to not become overwhelmed but instead be motivated by those efforts.

If the notes field isn’t showing up, my biggest point I want to make is that it’s more than worthwhile to read danah boyd’s It’s Complicated, to learn about the context to the statistics when it comes to teens using and growing up with the internet. While we can say that 95% of US teens use it, that number represents teens who are very active on the internet, as well as those who hop on for an hour each week at their public library.

All of my data came from the 2012 PEW Internet research study on teens and technology.

Keeping it Real with Contemporary Realistic YA Fiction


I’m not going to talk about this one a whole lot because I think the Prezi is self-explanatory. This should give you a pretty good overview of contemporary realistic YA fiction, a definition of the genre, and a way to think about this genre in new and creative ways.

There’s also a pretty sizable list of 2014 titles that have been recently released or will be coming out in the future.

For some reason, I can’t get the Prezi to embed properly, but if you click here, you can view it and be able to zoom in and out and around for maximum effect.