GRADES 9-12
2026 National Book Award honorees in Young People’s Literature read from and discuss their books, and answer questions from Miami-Dade County students. Hosted by Sabaa Tahir, National Book Award winner and author of Empire. For more information and to RSVP, contact Amelia Badri at [email protected].
Featured authors: In Delali Adjoa’s The Free Verse Society, two students from vastly different backgrounds – one a teen mom who secretly put her baby up for adoption, the other a delinquent who breaks into his old house – butt heads in the school poetry club and find connection as they write about love and loss. In Elana K. Arnold‘s Holloway, a girl travels to Paris to spread the ashes of her mother, who died in the pandemic, and finds herself transported as she grapples with grief and war. T.A. Chan’s The Celestial Seas delivers a breathless sci-fi reimagining of Moby Dick in space, where a young captain seeks her revenge against a sentient spacecraft known as the Ballena. That Which Feeds Us by Keala Kendall is a mystery, where one twin disappears at a Hawaiian wellness resort and her sister must uncover the island’s dark history to figure out what happened. Shook by Julian Randall follows a star basketballer whose varsity dreams are put in jeopardy when he fractures his ankle, and how he must heal physically and stay strong mentally to make the team. Matthew Swanson and Robbi Behr’s Life on the Moon follows the adventures of a preteen who follows his family to the first Moon colony… only to discover there’s a lot more undiscovered life up there than anyone thought.
Buy That Which Feeds Us: A Sunnie Reads Select: A Hawaiian Gothic
