John Green at Carnegie Hall for “An Evening of Awesome” on January 15.

On Thursday, February 14 at 4:50 p.m. EST, popular young adult author John Green will participate in a Google+ “fireside” Hangout with President Obama, following up on the State of the Union address to Congress. A group of participants, including John Green, will ask the president their own questions as well as those submitted by the public.

Viewers can tune in via the White House Google+ page or YouTube channel, and submit questions of their own via video or text through the channel. The deadline for submission of is 11:59 p.m. EST on Wednesday, February 13.

John Green is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Looking for Alaska, An Abundance of Katherines, and The Fault in Our Stars.

Google+ Hangouts allow up to 10 people to “hang out” via video chat. This is the President’s second time answering Americans’ questions via Hangout. In order to participate in a Hangout, a user has to sign in to Google+ and create a simple profile page.

Photo credit: Andrea Fischman.

New York City’s famed Carnegie Hall has hosted thousands of legendary performers since it opened in 1891, from the New York Philharmonic to jazz greats Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday to modern notables Isaac Stern and Renée Fleming. Joining their ranks this week? John Green—the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Looking for Alaska (Dutton, 2005), An Abundance of Katherines (Dutton, 2006), and Paper Towns (Dutton, 2008)—and his brother Hank Green, who took to the stage on Tuesday to entertain over 2,800 fans. “An Evening of Awesome,” featuring numerous special guests, was also lived-streamed to sites around the country through a special partnership with Tumblr.

Photo credit: Andrea Fischman.

The much-anticipated and hyped event was part of a 17-city tour celebrating the first anniversary of Green’s most recent bestselling YA fiction book, The Fault in Our Stars (Dutton, 2012); the tour has sold over 11,300 tickets.

For the uninitiated, the Green brothers are also known for their popular YouTube video blog series Vlogbrothers, which has close to a million subscribers. Passionate fans of the series, who call themselves “nerdfighters,” are so numerous and so well organized that they have created their own online social networking group to, as they declare,  “increase awesome and decrease suck.”

“It brought to life the Nerdfighter community,” says Elazar Nudell, 30, of the site. Nudell traveled all the way from Springfield, MA, to attend the sold-out event along with Max Schnaper, 21, and Sasha Zacharia, 21.

However, most of the live audience at Carnegie Hall was comprised of teenage girls.

“John Green understands teen girls,” 17-year-old Samantha from Merrick, NY, tells School Library Journal. She feels that Green’s books helped her during a troubling time in her life. “He made me realize that how I felt was OK.”

Her schoolmate, 16-year-old Johanna, claims that the author encouraged her to be a thoughtful person. While waiting for the show to begin, Johanna read to Sam from a book by her other favorite author, Kurt Vonnegut.

The evening was part rock concert, part author and literary reading, and part talk show.

Shouts of  “We love you!” rang out through the hall as the tuxedo-clad duo took the stage. John entertained the audience with a monologue about his life and work. He told them, “My life is like a very long Emily Dickinson poem.”

Hank sang songs of his own composition on such topics as Helen Hunt, Harry Potter, and Quarks. Grammy-winning musician and former member of The Moldy Peaches, Kimya Dawson, and the folk rock band The Mountain Goats also performed during the evening.

Later, Ashley Clements and Daniel Vincent Gordh, actors in the The Lizzie Bennet Diaries Web series developed by Hank Green, appeared to do a dramatic reading from The Fault in Our Star. The night’s special guests also were on hand to perform a Readers Theater scene from Paper Towns.

The surprise guest of the evening was Neil Gaiman. The award-winning author of The Graveyard Book (HarperCollins, 2008), participated in the Q&A portion of the evening, asking John Green such questions and queries as “Where do people go when they die?” (“Narnia,” interjected Hank) and “Describe yourself in three words,” to which John finally agreed on Handsome, Awesome, and Tall—after some prompting from Hank, Neil, and the audience.  Also during the Q&A, Hank Green admitted to having a crush on his high school English teacher.

During the event, Carnegie Hall became a trending topic on Twitter; already by noon on Wednesday there were more than 35,000 additional views of the event and 18,000 comments. Additional meetups around this event are scheduled for upcoming days; a schedule can be found here.

“This Year” singalong. Photo credit: Andrea Fischman.

For additional photos of this event from School Library Journal, check out our Tumblr feed!

Held at the at the New York Public Library, the speakers on the “The Changing Relationship Between Reader and Writer” panel discussed how much of their personal lives they share with readers. Moderator Karen Halpenny, vice president of Children’s Media Association, a nonprofit organization dedicated to distributing quality media to kids and young adults, brought up author John Green’s relationship to his audience as an example of the problems that can arise from a strong online presence. Although Green is famous for his enthusiastic interaction with his readers, he includes a page on his Tumblr site in which he urges fans to observe appropriate behavior when contacting him—and asks them not to come to his house or locate his address.

Adele Griffin prefers to maintain a healthy distance from her fans. She talked about her respect for Newbery-winning author and National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, Katherine Paterson, and her approach to meeting fans. While Griffin feels a strong connection with the beloved children’s book author and appreciates her books, she found Paterson much more reserved in person. Similarly, Griffin strives to establish a sense of intimacy with her readers through her written work rather than through real life encounters.

Sheinmel addressed how her fans perceive her, as well as her sense of obligation toward them. Because her upcoming novel, Stone Girl (Knopf, 2012), about a teenager coping with anorexia and bulimia, is based on personal experience, she feels a duty to handle body image issues responsibly when talking to readers. While the advanced reader copy of Stone Girl included a note detailing her own history with these disorders, Sheinmel ultimately decided to remove it, saying that she didn’t want it to affect the way fans viewed either her or her work.

Michael Northrop discussed interactions with adult fans. Because writers usually show a carefully crafted, optimal persona when communicating with fans online, he believes that some fans mistake these positive interactions for real friendship. However, he acknowledged that this response is simply part of being a writer with an online presence.

The authors also described the most effective ways of using social media to connect to fans. Gayle Forman devotes much time and energy into blogging, usually taking an entire day to compose a post. Though she finds blogging time-consuming, she prefers it to Twitter because she enjoys the opportunity to have longer, more drawn out conversations with her readers through the comments section.

While the writers feel that establishing an online identity can be challenging, they all remain committed to their fans.

For more coverage of KidLitCon 2012, please see our article on Critical Reviewing in the Age of Twitter.

Bryan Collier at the National Book Festival in DC.

More than 800 fans showed up to see Green, a New York Times bestselling author who’s received numerous awards including the Printz and a Printz Honor. Kinney spent four hours Saturday morning signing books for close to 2,000 fans. In all, 125 authors gathered for the two-day celebration, which took place September 22 and 23.

The festival began Friday evening, with invited guests gathered at the Library of Congress’s Jefferson Building to hear authors such as Patricia Cornwell talk about their craft. Cornwell recalled how she  always played detective—and how as a child she would read her school library sign out cards to gather information on the reading habits of her classmates. As in past years, the crowds were filled with teachers and librarians who make the annual pilgrimage to the capital.

Caryn Levy, a media coordinator at Leicester Elementary School in Leicester, NC, traveled to the event with her colleague Vicki Kolomechuk, a school librarian at Valley Spring Middle School in Bumcombe County, NC. They arrived early to get front row seats to hear author and illustrator Bryan Collier speak on Sunday. Meanwhile, the Junior Library Friends group from Weedsport, NY, made their annual trip to the festival to meet their favorite authors and tour the Pavilion of States.

Rafael Lopez, a Pura Belpre Award-winning illustrator, created the poster for this year’s festival with vivid colorful animals, birds, and insects peering down at child readers. Festival attendees received autographed copies of the poster. (View a slideshow of how the National Book Festival poster evolved).

Check out School Library Journal’s photo slideshow from this year’s National Book Festival.  Click on Show Info (upper right) to view captions.

Star Wars: National Star Wars Reads Day is October 6. The event is an initiative of Lucasfilm and its publishing partners, Abrams, Chronicle Books, Dark Horse, Del Rey, DK, Scholastic, Titan Magazines, and Workman. Although the sign-up period to receive a free Star Wars event kit from the sponsors (1000 libraries signed up) has ended, there is another option available for libraries that want to participate in the event. ABDO Publishing is offering a free Star Wars event guide containing teacher’s guides, promotional posters, interviews with celebrities connected to the franchise, a list of nearly 300 Star Wars universe terms, a video of the event that was held in the Hennepin County Library in Minneapolis, and an order form for the 68 ABDO/Spotlight Star Wars library editions. You can also follow Star Wars Reads Day on Facebook.

Game On

Free online game: Electronic Arts’s Star Wars: The Old Republic, previously a subscription only massively multiplayer online game (MMOG), will be available online for free starting this fall. The free version allows players “to play free to Level 50, with game play restrictions that limit game options and access to certain game content,” according to Jeff Hickman, the game’s executive producer. Those who continue to subscribe for $15 per month will have free unlimited access to all game features and game updates. The publisher will rely on players buying premium content and virtual items to make money.

Digitally Yours

Multimedia ebooks: eBoost is ABDO Digital’s new multimedia line of flip book ebooks that are combined with related media links. Among the multimedia features of ABDO’s flip books is the ability for readers to turn pages and make them larger. Each ebook in the new eBoost line also includes Web links; downloadable content; embedded videos; RSS and/or Twitter feeds; notes and custom links fields for teacher comments, posting messages, and student assignments; and more. The eBoost titles, featuring secure Web-based hosting by ABDO, are compatible with Macs, PCs, iPads, and Android-based tablets such as Kindle Fire or the Nook. The new line is being launched with 164 titles for elementary through middle grade students. Titles can be ordered individually or in bundles such as Animal Kingdom, Body Systems, The Civil War, Planet Earth, and more. eBoost is sold as a site license with simultaneous access for multiple users.

Granted

Public awareness campaign: The 2013 Scholastic Library Publishing National Library Week Grant is an annual $3000 award open to all libraries. To apply for the grant, libraries must come up with a public awareness campaign using the National Library Week Theme—“Communities matter @ your library—and involving at least one other community organization. An application form and guidelines are available on the Scholastic Library Publishing National Library Week Grant website. The application deadline is September 30. The winner will be announced after the ALA Midwinter Meeting in Seattle in January 2013. The winner must provide documentation of their activities and submit a report to ALA’s Public Awareness Committee by May 20. The grant is sponsored by Scholastic Library Publishing and is administered by the Public awareness Committee of the American Library Association (ALA).

Read On

Literacy initiative: Author John Green, Michael L. Printz and Edgar Award winner, has been named the spokesperson for the 2012 Teen Read Week, a literacy initiative of the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA). The theme of this year’s Teen Read Week—celebrated October 14-20—is “It Came from the Library!” “Getting more teens to pick up a book and make it a regular habit” is what Teen Read Week is all about says Jack Martin, YALSA president. Among his duties, Green will host a national event to kick off the celebration and will judge a contest in which teens are charged with creating a video about their favorite book.

“Our director of schools reviewed it and decided it probably shouldn’t be required reading,” says Jeremy Johnson, spokesperson for Sumner County Schools, where the book was pulled. “We’re not using it in the curriculum, but it will still be used in the libraries.

The decision came after students in an English class at White House High School chose the YA novel for a class assignment this spring. Johnson says the district had some “inquiries from parents,” and the principal went through the book himself, deciding to pull it because he “thought it had a sex scene that was a bit much for the curriculum,” explains Johnson. The district followed, banning it in all classes.

Johnson says the teacher failed to follow “standard procedures” by having the book pre-approved by the school principal prior to assigning it to students. The book also wasn’t sent home on a syllabus earlier in the year as part of the class assigned materials—two more reasons the principal cited for his decision to remove the book from the curriculum.

Looking for Alaska, Green’s debut novel and 2006 Michael L. Printz award-winner about a teen who attends boarding school and falls in with a wild crowd, has come under fire in the past for oral sex scenes that take place between students at a boarding school in Alabama. The book was withdrawn from schools in Depew, NY in 2008, and in March from classes in Knox County, TN, according to The Tennessean.

Sumner County Schools’ decision has angered groups from the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression to the National Coalition Against Censorship, which this week sent a letter to Director of Schools Del Phillips, condemning the district’s decision to withdraw the book.

“As a result, the district has imposed one viewpoint on the entire student body, without regard to the educational consequences for students,” says the letter, adding that it “is irrelevant that the book is still in the library and that students are free to read it on their own time.”

Librarian Doreen Brown from Station Camp High School in Sumner County says although her principal hasn’t asked her to pull the book from her library, she wrote a letter herself expressing her frustration with the decision.

“It’s really outraged a lot of school librarians in our county,” she says.

Green addressed complaints about his book on YouTube in 2008 and tweeted about recent news accounts on the ban in Sumner County. Emails to Green and his publisher were not returned. Waiting for Alaska made the American Library Association‘s 2005 Top 10 Best Book for Young Adults. Paramount purchased the film rights in 2005, and the movie is scheduled to be released in 2013.