There are nodal moments in (book) history, and you are invited to one of them. Backstory: Way back in the 1990s, Michael Cart invited me to speak on a panel at an American Library Association (ALA) conference. We were there to defend books for teenagers, when the word in the publishing industry was “YA Is Dead.” The days of great authors like Paul Zindel and Judy Blume, with paperback editions of their books finding their way into backpacks and back pockets, were over. All the bookstore chains wanted were picture books or light, middle-grade titles. Older teenagers seemed to have disappeared—the entire nation had made its transition out of the 1960s, locking the days of rebellion into the half-nostalgia, half-regret of films like The Big Chill. But I insisted that “YA LIVES” and Cart and I, and many friends including the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) Board, created the Michael L. Printz Award. The prize did not create the modern YA explosion, but the consciousness-raising at ALA was one of those legendary instances where daring to announce something helped call it into being. Now: On December 10th, the New York Public Library is hosting a discussion with the slightly stiff title of “Around the Globe: International Diversity in YA Writing.” Arthur Levine, who has an eponymous imprint at Scholastic and is a strong advocate of books by international authors; Padma Venkatraman, whose YA novel A Time to Dance (Nancy Paulsen Books/Penguin, 2014) has been receiving so much attention; Roxanne Feldman, a librarian at a New York City private school and who grew up in Taiwan; and Briony Everroad (more on her in a moment) will make up the panel. I’ll be moderating. The occasion for the discussion—and for my call to arms in this column—is that Everroad along with Daniel Hahn, editor of second edition of The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature (Oxford University Press, Spring, 2015), and the team at Words Without Borders (WWB) have crafted an issue focused on YA writing in translation. You'll find it on their website as their December issue. For the issue, Everroad and Hahn have sifted through writing from around the world, found translators, and provided us with works about and for teenagers translated from languages from Arabic and Bangla to Norwegian and Spanish. In turn, WWB is using this initial selection of YA writing as part of their launch of an education program that will bring those voices into schools. American youth will be able to discover, to compare, and to contrast what it is like to be a teenager, to be alive, to be between childhood and adulthood around the world. Translation has always been challenging— it’s hard to find out about original works if you don’t read the language, tough to crack into the now super-robust YA fiction market, and difficult to find a market for books that may present unfamiliar cultural perspectives. But WWB has laid the groundwork and provided us with a tool to open the door, to listen to the voices, and to begin connecting teenagers with their global peers. And if you can make it to the city, you can be there for the launch—the proverbial bottle of champagne cracked across the bow. If you can’t, go to the site, read the issue, spread the word—be apostles of change. We did it with YA—we can do it again.