The Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia had its hands full on Monday, January 28, as a room full of excited librarians, publishers, authors, and other industry professionals breathlessly awaited the start of the annual Youth Media Awards. In fact, by the time I arrived (bleary-eyed and bushy tailed) at the convention center, it was 7:55 AM and there was no official room left for audience members. Instead, I found a seat in a “spillover” room where the awards were being broadcasted live on a screen. By 8:30 AM, the spillover room was entirely full.
My friend who called the YMAs “the librarian Oscars” was pretty spot-on, after all.
It’s hard to describe how incredible it was to witness people applaud, groan, cheer, whisper, and even shed tears over children’s and young adult literature. It’s even harder to describe how it felt to sit next to perfect strangers at 8 AM on a Monday morning knowing that they were just as passionate as you about youth media. Suffice it to say that I have never seen a room full of introverts whoop and holler so loudly before. For those who aren’t “in the know,” I would describe the purpose of the YMAs, in part, as providing “those fancy silver and gold stickers you see on the covers of books.”
Check out previous interviews in the One Thing Leads to Another series here.
I’m pretty sure the first book I read that was written by David Levithan was Boy Meets Boy, though it might have been The Realm of Possibility since I was, as is often the case, late to the party. I say “written by” because of course I’d been reading books published and edited by him for years. (He’s the founding editor of Scholastic’s PUSH imprint, and edits and publishes authors like Suzanne Collins, Maggie Stiefvater, Garth Nix, Alice Hoffman, M. T. Anderson, and Cecil Castellucci.) I know I quickly rounded up at least four or five “written by” novels as soon as I finished Boy Meets Boy and spent a wonderful couple of weeks catching up, and and afterwards I made sure that I kept up with each new book that came out, which, honestly, is no small feat when you’re talking about David Levithan. I mean, in the last year (almost to the day) he’s given us Every Day, which comes out in paperback on September 10th, and its digital-only companion, Six Earlier Days; Invisibility, a collaboration with Andrea Cremer; and Two Boys Kissing (out this very week) about which David says, “In honor of its release, and tying very much to its themes, I will be giving two dollars for each copy sold in the first three weeks to The Trevor Project, an amazing organization that supports queer youth. So buy early and buy often and help me support an amazing cause.”
Thank you, David, for taking the time to talk with me about your teen years, your work as an editor, and your fantastic books.
Always Something There to Remind Me
Photo by Jake Hamilton
Please describe your teenage self.
Bookish, happy, well adjusted.Not a large leap from my current self.
What did you want to be when you grew up? Why?
I knew words would be involved in some way, but had to figure out which way.(In the end, I feel like I chose them all, or at least a few variations.)If you’d asked me in high school, I probably would have guessed I would have become a journalist or an editor.I wouldn’t have been surprised at being a novelist, but I definitely would have been impressed that I’d managed to finish something.
What were your high school years like?
I was at Millburn High School in Millburn, NJ, and I liked it.There was a lot of pressure to get into a good college, but at some point I came to peace with the fact that I was never going to be in the top ten in my class (amusingly, I ended up at #11), so I didn’t devote my life to my homework.I did, however, devote much of my life to my friends; for most of high school, it was a core group of about seven girls and me, and then senior year it was my two closest best friends (who were sophomores)–we called ourselves Siberia, which is really all you need to know.Only in this case, Siberia was located very close to the mall, and everyone else.Oh, and I was reading all the time.I wrote authors’ names on my jeans.I was that cool.
