Our next OYAN member meeting will be on Friday, July 28th!
This meeting will be virtual and run from 11am-1pm. The Zoom link can be found on the OLA website in the events calendar. If you are an OYAN member or CSD member, you should have received another email with the Zoom link info in your email.
I wanted to take this opportunity to address the listserv and invite folks *who serve young adults in Oregon* who may NOT be current members of OYAN to attend this meeting and see what we’re all about! We’re hoping to get feedback from folks about what you want from OYAN moving forward, but we can make any changes if we don’t hear from you!
Discuss with us! The Oregon Young Adult Network is inviting teen readers and adults who work with teens in libraries to share a very marvelous experience!
It is called the 2023 Oregon Mock Printz. What do we do? We find and read 8 outstanding books from 2022 and then spend an afternoon in an intensive discussion of those books. Then we vote which is most likely to be a contender for the 2023 Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature.
It is free and open any teen or adult who works with teens and it is SO MUCH FUN.
When: 12-4:30 p.m. Saturday, January 14
THIS IS A HYBRID EVENT
In person: Salem Public Library, 585 Liberty St. SE
A little note about the Teen Readers – I encourage you to ask around! For the right teens, I can tell you from experience that this event is MAGICAL. It takes preparation because of the pre-reading, yet introduces readers to some excellent books and offers them a chance to meet and talk with other extreme book nerds. It is SOOO worth the time and effort to those readers.
I have created a couple of images that might help you promote this with your teen readers!
Transportation can be a challenge. I will share two thoughts – first, although I’m not allowed to drive teens, Salem has had a parent who was willing to drive and wait for the kids year after year (clearly, he also had fun); second, there is a virtual option and teens can join solo from their homes or as a group from your library if you’re willing to arrange.
If you need help brainstorming solutions, reach out. Teen readers enrich the Mock Printz greatly and they are enriched by it as well!
In mid-October 2020, the Beaverton City Library was approached by Riley Kessler, a then 15-year-old Girl Scout who was looking to earn her Gold Award, which is the highest level awarded in Girl Scouts. According to the Girl Scouts, “Gold Award Girl Scouts are rock stars, role models, and real-life heroes. How do they do it? By using everything they’ve learned as a Girl Scout to help fix a problem in their community or make a lasting change in their world.” Riley had participated in some of the library’s previous creative writing contests and proposed that we put together a similar writing project that would allow teenagers to talk about their experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic in a form of writing that they chose. I was unable to have in-person programs, so I was eager to have the opportunity to help Riley with her project. It aligned perfectly with core YALSA and library values and gave teens in our community a voice during the pandemic.
The structure of the project took place over several months. From the outset, I wanted this to be Riley’s project with me in an advisory role. We at first envisioned this as a contest with prizes, like the library’s creative writing contests, but we soon decided to just make it a writing project that would collect experiences for the historical record. As Riley writes, “My goal throughout working on the project was, simply, to bring a voice to a frequently ignored demographic, and in the process help adults gain an understanding of the hardships of being a teenager during such a strange and stressful period of history.” One of the requirements of the Gold Award is that the project must “be sustainable and measurable,” so the entries that we received would be compiled into a book that would be cataloged and added to the Beaverton City Library’s collection and published on the Web. We gave writers the option to remain anonymous due to the personal nature of the writing.
I put together a PDF flyer explaining the project and sent it to Riley for her edits and approval. We collected submissions from April to June of 2021 via an online form created by Beaverton’s Web team. Riley did much of the work getting the word out to schools and the news media about her project. She was featured on KGW news,KPTV, and KATU as well as the Oregon Historical Society’s newsletter. Once the deadline passed, she edited the submissions and put them together into a booklet that we printed through Beaverton’s repro services department. Riley also set up a Web site to share the writing with the public. All told, the project took approximately 13 months from conception to completion, with Riley putting in 80+ hours of work on it.
I’m honored to have been able to help Riley earn her Gold Award by assisting in an advisory capacity for her project. It was great to be able to help with something meaningful during a dark time when so many other things that I enjoy about being a librarian were not possible.
Do you like young adult books? Do you like to talk? Want to talk about young adult books? Let’s do it!
The 2022 Mock Printz, hosted by the Oregon Young Adult Network, is free and open to teens and adults who work with teens.
1-5 p.m Saturday, January 22 | On Zoom
What do we do? We find and read 8 outstanding books from 2021 and then spend an afternoon in an intensive discussion of those books. Then we vote which is most likely to be a contender for the 2022 Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature.
The City Beautiful by Aden Polydoros – A haunting, Jewish, queer historical fantasy where dreams meet nightmares in 1893 Chicago
All Our Hidden Gifts by Caroline O’Donoghue – A Irish schoolgirl delving into a talent for tarot reading is pulled through the edges of reality
The Burning: Black Wall Street and the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 adapted by Hilary Beard from the book by Tim Madigan – Absorbs the reader in the moment and impact of one of the worst acts of racial violence in America’s history
When We Make It by Elisabet Velasquez – A searing novel in verse lays bare the joys and pain of a first-generation Puerto Rican growing up in Bushwick
Incredible Doom by Matthew Bogart and Jesse Holden – Return to the 90s in a graphic novel connecting three teens on the fringe through newfangled Internet technology
Firekeeper’s Daughter by Angeline Boulley – Daunis Fontaine goes undercover for the FBI, seeking answers about a murder and her place in her Ojibwe community
Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo – A tender, risky first love blooms between Lily and Kath in San Francisco’s 1954 Chinatown
In the Wild Light by Jeff Zentner – Deep roots in Appalachia pull at Cash even as he escapes to a new prep-school life in Connecticut and comes into his own as a poet
3) Join us from 1-5 p.m. Saturday, January 22 on Zoom. Information will be emailed to all registered participants as The Big Day approaches.
Join us at the virtual joint OYAN/CSD meeting on Friday, November 19, from 12:00 PM—2:00 PM.
During the first hour, Meredith Farkas will lead a discussion about Slow Librarianship. If you did not see her presentation at the 2021 OLA Conference or want a refresher, please watch her presentation on YouTube prior to the meeting. During the second hour, OYAN will convene the quarterly meeting. I you would like to suggest an agenda items, please send them to oyan at olaweb.org
The link to the zoom meeting will be sent out on the OYAN and Kids-lib listservs at a later date. If you’re not already registered for those lists, you can do so here: https://bit.ly/orlists.
Tualatin Library doing the same Bingo cards for all ages. They have boxes like “Read a book with a cat” or “Read a book written by an Oregon author,” so they can be used for any age. Everyone who finishes a bingo will receive two free books. No goals until next summer.
We have returning teen volunteers and 5 new ones (22 total). The 5 have been volunteering for us this school year and were invited to join the summer teens. We didn’t open up applications like usual since we aren’t sure how much we will have for them to do or if they will be allowed in the building.
I’m doing 6 weeks of virtual programs including needle felting, Kahoot trivia, and an Escape Room.
The 2021 Oregon Young Adult Network Mock Printz readers and coordinators are pleased to announce that the winner – after hours of discussion and debate among the 44 participants – is:
We Are Not From Here by Jenny Torres Sanchez
This book follows the lives and journey of three children from Puerto Barrios, Guatamala who are forced to flee their community. They join forces to attempt to travel north and cross into the United States. Poignant and harrowing, Mock Printz readers agreed this is a difficult story to absorb, but many expressed they wish “everyone would read it.”
The Mock Printz group also awarded honor status to:
Elatsoe by Darcie Little Badger – a paranormal, magic-filled murder mystery set in an alternate Texas
The Magic Fish by Trung Le Nguyen – a graphic novel exploring identity and family against a backdrop of multicultural fairy tales
The Oregon Mock Printz is an event hosted by the Oregon Young Adult Network in which teen and adult readers linked to libraries across Oregon first read eight possible contenders for the Michael J. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature, then gather for an afternoon of intense discussion and voting in an attempt to guess which book from the previous year will receive the Printz Award later in January. This year’s Printz Award will be announced as part of the American Library Association’s Youth Media Award virtual event at 6 a.m. Pacific Time on Monday, January 25.
Other books considered for the Oregon Mock Printz this year were: Clap When You Land by Elizabeth Acevedo; Not So Pure and Simple by Lamar Giles; Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You by Jason Reynolds; The Rise and Fall of Charles Lindbergh by Candace Fleming; and The Black Flamingo by Dean Atta.
-Written by Sonja Somerville, Salem Public Library
CINDY HAWKINS AND KELLY MARTINEZ AT HERMISTON PUBLIC LIBRARY
Hermiston Public Library is doing STEM as well as fun take-and-make kits for teens in our area. Our Halloween mask take-and-make kit was the most popular. Our mold experiment was also popular. The online gaming challenge didn’t work out as well as we were hoping. It seemed that with needing to be online so much for school, many of the teens were interested, but didn’t actually do it. Part of the problem was also that their school tablets didn’t allow access to the game, but they only let us know that after the deadline for submitting scores.
These are some of the very successful activities Cindy put together. We hope you enjoy them!
In November we ran a month long STEM mold experiment. We took slices of bread and wiped them on different surfaces around town. We then sealed those slices in ziplock bags, which were labeled, and placed them on a darkened, covered shelf in the library. Patrons could come in and see how the mold was developing. Below is the photo that was taken at the end of November just before we removed the display.
For Halloween we created a mask take-and-make craft. We bought the masks from Oriental Trading and added a paintbrush and paint to each kit.
For TeenTober, we challenged 6 of our closest libraries to an online gaming challenge. Each library found teens to represent them by playing an online zombie game. The teens were sent a link to the game and played from the safety of their home and then sent in their scores. The library whose teen got the highest score won. Hermiston won the brain trophy. (We are hoping to make this an annual event where each library has a chance to challenge the other libraries to an event of their choosing.)
For Thanksgiving, we put together a Gratitude Rock take-and-make kit. The kit included a rock, paintbrush, paint, and an acrylic pen. Teens could decorate their rocks with reasons to be grateful and keep them or leave them somewhere for someone to find. Tip: We gave out paint in tiny plastic containers with lids which we placed in a ziplock sandwich bag as an extra precaution.
For Christmas, we are putting together a reindeer take-and-make craft. The kit includes a reindeer kit that we bought from Oriental Trading and glue dots to put it together. Oriental Trading no longer sells these kits.
For New Years, we are doing a Photo Booth Accessories take-and-make craft. The kit will consist of a dry erase photo bubble board that we bought from Oriental Trading and dry erase makers.
Our January take-and-make craft will be a STEM craft where teens can make “stars in a jar“. The kit will consist of a glow stick, a glass jar and diamond glitter.
At Forest Grove, we did weekly teen take & makes during summer reading and then switched to monthly crafts in October because 1) It was WAY more time consuming than I initially expected—especially when I’m only in the building a 1-3 times a week, and 2) With fewer crafts I’d be able to invest more money in the supplies. Another difference from summer crafts is that I now require online registration, this way I know if I need to increase/decrease the amount of supplies I need (I usually cap around 25 to start, then use the waiting list.) I’m hoping to be able to increase the amount of kits I can make in the next few months, because now my Teen Library Council members will be helping to assemble them so it’s not a one-woman operation. I include everything needed except scissors and, I gotta say, glue dots are life-changing.
My two most popular crafts so far have been Spider Soap and 2020 Holiday Ornaments. So far, Spider Soap has been the only craft where I’ve asked teens to return an item when they were done so we could reuse them (the silicone mold)—and most of them DID get returned! The craft itself was super easy, quick, and adaptable – you can put any plastic critter or toy in the soap you want. The 2020 Ornaments were materials we already had on hand, and the “Commemorative Toilet Paper Crisis” ornament has been an especially big hit.
BRAD CLARK AT WILSONVILLE PUBLIC LIBRARY
My library did bags to promote some online events.
In October I did a treats and tricks bag with silly things like a bottle of silly string, some candy, a balloon (to pop and scare someone), and some other simple fun bits. I attached flyers to the bags to promote our Annual Teen Murder Mystery and Costume Contest.
This month we did Hot Cocoa bags to go along with our Among Us Pajama Party. Each had mix, some marshmallows, candycane spoon, etc.
Both events saw a jump in attendance compared to previous events. Thought it can also just be the popularity of Among Us right now, which we are playing at each event after booktalks and usually some other game.
OYAN - Oregon Young Adult Network 