Saturday, November 26, 2011

NCTE recap Part III: Saturday

Saturday was like a roller coaster ride. Fast, furious, lots of curves, screaming, laughing, and finally relief to have survived. it began at 6 am when I headed down to help set up for the ALAN Breakfast. This was my first breakfast as the ALAN Executive Secretary, and I was so nervous even though all I had to do was make a few announcements.

Gary Salvner received the Hipple Award for his considerable contributions to ALAN and gave the most stirring speech I can recall hearing in some time. I do hope THE ALAN REVIEW sees fit to publish it. Sharon Draper received the ALAN Award for her contributions to YA literature and was equally eloquent and moving. And then, Jacqueline Woodson delivered the after breakfast speech. Wowwza! Triple whammy.

Here is a photo done with Toon Paint showing James Dashner, Marshall George, and the lovely Adrienne Waintraub at breakfast courtesy of Random House. I did tweet out from the breakfast as well. If you search Twitter, use #alan11 hashtag and username @ProfessorNana.



I did a quick tour of the exhibits that grew lengthier as I kept running into folks. I also had a meeting with my editor at Stenhouse about a couple of projects. Then, onto the shuttle to the Palmer House for the Middle Mosaic where I spoke along with Kate Messner, Janet Allen, and Gordon Korman. My presentation (all of them) are at Slideshare.net/ProfessorNana.

After I spoke, I went up two floors to join Donalyn Miller, Franki Sibberson, and Sara Kajder for a session on engaging readers with digital texts and tools. Of course we experienced some technical issues. Sara had to use my dongle (there was much hilarity about my magic dongle), my own connections had to be held so they did not slip, etc. However, as Donalyn observed when it was all over, each of us was tweeting, buying apps, and tools as the others were speaking. When is the last time that happened? it was a whirlwind 75 minutes. I learned a LOT!

Dinner that evening was courtesy of Candlewick. Katherine Paterson, Laura Amy Schlitz, Chris Crowe, MT Anderson, Allan Wolf, Abby MacDonald. Great food and fun and conversation ranging from zombies to Common Core to books (of course). Thanks Jenny and Sharon and Liz for a delightful evening.

1 comment:

  1. I'm thankful I know a few of those names, thanks to your YA lit class!

    ReplyDelete