T149.
Writing Young Protagonists: YA or A & Who Decides?
Thursday, March 24, 2022
10:35 am to 11:50 am
Why do we write young protagonists? Are coming-of-age stories YA? What happens when our young protagonist is defined as YA contrary to our intentions? What craft choices do we make when we intend to write YA? Panelists discuss when writer intentions and reader perceptions coincide and when they diverge with respect to writing young protagonists. They share the changes they did or didn’t make in the writing, revising, and marketing of their work to satisfy their own intentions and perceptions.
Participants
Donna Miscolta is the author of three books of fiction. Living Color: Angie Rubio Stories (2020) is her latest. Her work reflects her Filipino and Mexican heritage. Recent essays appear in Poetry Northwest and The Museum of Americana. She recently retired as a project manager in local government.
Leslie Pietrzyk is the author of Admit This to No One, Silver Girl, and This Angel on My Chest, a collection of short stories that won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize. She teaches fiction at the Converse College low-residency MFA program.
Jessica Barksdale’s second poetry collection, Grim Honey, and her fifteenth novel, The Play’s the Thing, were both published in 2021. She teaches novel writing for UCLA EX and in the MFA program at SNHU.
Lan Samantha Chang is the author of The Family Chao, Inheritance, All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost, and Hunger: A Novella and Stories. The recipient of a 2021 Berlin Prize Fellowship, she is director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
Amanda Floresca is a graduate student at the University of South Carolina earning a master’s in library and information science. She has a BA in English with a concentration in creative writing and an MFA from Converse College. Her current project is a YA #OwnVoices novel.
