Here comes the Texas Teen Book Festival, a day-long feast for the relentlessly ink-hungry among us who revel in the best of what corporate marketing departments like to brand as YA fiction.

Here’s the fourth annual event, occupying a paper-packed, author-crowded, and thoroughly literate section of St. Edward’s University’s tree-lined campus on Saturday, Oct. 7.

[Note: It’s the fourth annual event that’s been called the Texas Teen Book Festival, yes – although it started out as the Austin Teen Book Festival (and was so much smaller) back in 2009. It was in Westlake then. And the country had a much better president.]

[So, considering that whole Ship-of-Theseus thing, it’s actually the ninth annual incarnation of this excellent to-do, isn’t it?]

And “author-crowded,” we say – which assertion is backed up by the sweet plethora of scribes there to present their newest works and, occasionally, regale the gathered booklovers (that’s you, citizen) with more than a few choice words of wisdom and insider knowledge. We’re downright excited, tbh, to note that Marie Lu (author of the bestselling Legend series and this new Warcross exploit) and Jason Reynolds (the man behind Long Way Down and that Miles Morales incarnation of Spider-Man) are the keynote speakers this year.

(And glad to see that, among all the authors signing their books and making festival-type convo with fans, one of the local creators hawking their wares is Austin’s own Tillie Walden – author of the coming-of-age, coming-out, and I-was-a-competitive-figure-skater-in-my-childhood-WTF? graphic novel, Spinning.)

This day’s gonna have it all, in other words: Graphic-novel memoirs; dystopian-future adventures; supernatural romances that could break a Selkie’s salt-stained heart; soul-searching journeys through the decaying corpse of modern America. All those books you’ve read, and the ones you want to read, and even more that you didn’t even know about until … and there’s the person who wrote it, right there, and … OK, OK, it all sounds like a Real Good Time – as far as books go, anyway, right?

And books, yeah, books go pretty damn far.
But you only have to get to St. Ed’s this Saturday.


This article appears in September 29 • 2017.

A note to readers: Bold and uncensored, The Austin Chronicle has been Austin’s independent news source for over 40 years, expressing the community’s political and environmental concerns and supporting its active cultural scene. Now more than ever, we need your support to continue supplying Austin with independent, free press. If real news is important to you, please consider making a donation of $5, $10 or whatever you can afford, to help keep our journalism on stands.

SUPPORT US