F156A.
PEN Presents: Free the Books
Friday, February 9, 2024
10:35 am to 11:50 am
In facing rising threats to the freedoms to read and imagine, PEN America convenes a dialogue with beloved writers on the recent and dramatic rise in the efforts to censor and silence Black and LGBTQIA+ perspectives.
Bestselling authors of young adult fiction and fantasy will be in conversation with Kasey Meehan, director of PEN America’s Freedom to Read program. Together, they will assess the impact of book banning and censorship on society and especially upon traditionally marginalized communities, as well as provide insight into how one can combat book banning at a local level.
The panel conversation will be followed by an afternoon workshop led by Kasey Meehan. Additional panelists to be announced.
This event will take place in person in the Kansas City Convention Center and will be livestreamed for virtual audiences. All livestreamed events include open captions and ASL interpretation.
Participants
Kasey Meehan is the Freedom to Read program director at PEN America, leading their initiatives to protect students’ right to freely access literature in schools. Previously, Meehan served as the associate director of postsecondary policy at Research for Action, a mission-driven education research organization in Philadelphia. Meehan’s research centers students’, educators’, and school leaders’ experiences in identifying strategies for reform and capturing emerging best practices, and strives to connect research to policy and program change. Meehan holds a BA from the University of Pennsylvania and an MPA from the Fels Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, along with a certificate in politics.
Ryan La Sala is the bestselling author of books about surreal things happening to queer people, known for his genre defying and defining YA horrors Beholder and The Honeys, which is in development to become a major motion picture with Anonymous Content. His work has been featured in the New York Times, NPR, and Entertainment Weekly. He lives in a small NYC apartment with his cat, Haunted Little Girl.
Padma Venkatraman is the author of Born Behind Bars, The Bridge Home, A Time To Dance, Island’s End and Climbing the Stairs. Her work has won a Walter Dean Myers Award, Golden Kite Award, Crystal Kite Award, two Paterson Prizes, two Julia Ward Howe awards, two Nerdies, three South Asia Book Awards, ALA Notable, NYPL Best Book, and many other awards and honors. Her poetry has been published in Poetry magazine. Before becoming an American author, Dr. Venkatraman was an oceanographer and diversity director. Visit her at https://padmavenkatraman.com/ to explore resources and sign up for her newsletter.
Named one of The Root’s 100 most influential African Americans and BET’s 100 entertainers and innovators of the year, Leatrice “Elle” McKinney, writing as L.L. McKinney, is an advocate for equality and inclusion in publishing, and the creator of the hashtags #PublishingPaidMe and #WhatWoCWritersHear. A lover of comics, anime, video games, sci-fi, and fantasy, she strives to push these mediums toward representation that better reflects the diverse world we live in. Elle lives in Kansas City, spending her free time plagued by her two cats: Sir Chester Fluffmire Boopsnoot Purrington Wigglebottom Flooferson III, esquire, Baron o'Butterscotch and Lord Humphrey Blepernicus Zoomerson Wailingshire Toebeanstein Chirpingston IV, Breaker of Things I Love. Or Chester and Humphrey for short. Her works include the Nightmare-Verse books, Nubia: Real One through DC, Marvel’s Black Widow: Bad Blood, Power Rangers: Heir to Darkness, and more.
Laurel Snyder is the author of eight novels for children: Orphan Island, My Jasper June, The Witch of Woodland, Bigger than a Bread Box, Penny Dreadful, Any Which Wall, Up and Down the Scratchy Mountains OR The Search for a Suitable Princess, and Seven Stories Up. She has also written many picture books, including Charlie and Mouse (with Emilly Hughes), Endlessly Every After (with Dan Santat), The Forever Garden (with Samantha Cotterill), Swan, the Life and Dance of Anna Pavlova (with Julie Morstad), Inside the Slidy Diner (with Jaime Zollars), and Baxter, the Pig Who Wanted to Be Kosher (with David Goldin).
In addition to her books for children, Laurel has written two books of poems, Daphne & Jim: a choose-your-own-adventure biography in verse (Burnside Review Press, 2005) and The Myth of the Simple Machines (No Tell Books, 2007). She also edited an anthology of nonfiction, Half/Life: Jew-ish tales from Interfaith Homes (Soft Skull Press, 2006). A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a former Michener-Engle Fellow, Laurel has published work in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, the Utne Reader, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Revealer, Salon, The Iowa Review, American Letters and Commentary, and elsewhere. She was an occasional commentator for NPR’s All Things Considered, and she currently teaches in the MFAC program at Hamline University, and also in the creative writing department at Emory University.
A Baltimore native, Laurel lives in Atlanta (in beautiful Ormewood Park), with her family. Which is really the best part.
