Boston Teen Author Festival 2016 Recap

On Saturday, September 24th I was fortunate to attend the Boston Teen Author Festival in Cambridge, MA. The Boston Teen Author Festival expanded this year to celebrate their 5th year anniversary! This year, the festival was hosted at the Cambridge Public Library and at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School.

I wanted to grab a coffee prior to the festival so I swung by Starbucks and bumped into Kim from Book Munchies. Afterwards, I met up with Elizabeth from Book YAbber to venture to the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School for the intro panel. I ended up saying hi to my friends Alberto and Jess before walking to the auditorium.

We ended up running into Rachel from Rachel Writes Things right before we entered the auditorium. The intro panel featured all 35 authors and was located in the auditorium and can I say that the place was pretty much packed. I am so glad to see so many YA readers in one room with amazing YA authors. Instead of doing 3-4 panels back to back, Elizabeth and I decided to only attend two panels for the rest of the day.

I skipped the Panel A from 11:15 to 12:00 for lunch with Elizabeth. We ended up going to a local market to get some hot foods. We ended having some rice, some really tasty teriyaki chicken and a couple other sides. It was a decent lunch although it was kind of expensive but it definitely beat the food truck. We ended up sitting outside next to Rachel and Adrienne. Of course we were sitting right across from no other than Emery Lord!!! How exciting! I was able to chat with Ellie from By Ellie M a few times when I saw her in the library helping attendees find panel rooms.

For The Panel B section, Elizabeth and I bumped into Alberto and Jess again at the Magic Beyond the Grave panel at the Cambridge Public Library. This panel was my favorite and it was absolutely hilarious! Roshani Chokshi, Zoraida Córdova and Daniel Jose Older definitely carried the panel well and self moderated the panel. They had intriguing answers to questions asked and they gave good tips to give to the audience. I also saw Cara Bertrand before the panel which is pretty cool. Her Sententia series is one of my favorite paranormal boarding school series of all time. Cara surprised me with a copy of Tangled Thoughts, which is the third book in the series.

Afterwards, the four of us ended up going to back to the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School to check out the books being sold and to pick up our Kickstarter rewards. We enjoyed the nice weather before venturing to the teen room at the Cambridge Public Library. The last panel we attended was located in the Teen Room. The Journey Toward Mental Health was a change of pace from the Magic Beyond the Grave panel. This panel was serious and heavy in terms of the subject matter. Kathryn Holmes, Emery Lord, Natasha Sinel and Francisco X. Stork self-moderated the panel with Emery Lord taking the lead!

Elizabeth and I left the panel a little bit early to beat the huge rush at the signing line near the cafeteria. During last round of OSTPSecretSister, I ended up writing to Kat while Kat ended up writing to Elizabeth. It was definitely the icing on the cake to meet Kat and her friend during the signing line! It was awesome to have all of us together!

BTAF did an excellent job organizing the signing area with authors sitting in alphabetical order by last name except for Victoria Schwab and Roshani Chokshi. I was able to meet a lot of wonderful authors like Emery Lord and Melissa Landers. I was too excited about meeting both of them because I love their books!! It's awesome how Emery remembered me from twitter! I was able to see Marie Rutkoski and Zoraida Córdova at the signing areas and I briefly saw Roshani Chokshi and Lori Goldstein when walking around BTAF.

BTAF is definitely a great place to meet up with YA book lovers! All the authors are fantastic and are super nice! Also, I was able to get together with old friends and I met some new ones. I hope you are able to attend BTAF next year if you are near the Boston area. It's definitely worth checking it out at least one time in your life.

After BTAF, Elizabeth and I walked through Harvard University and then went to dinner at John Harvard's with Kat and her friend. I was so excited to sit down to eat and chat. I had a pretty tasty dinner of salmon on a bed of snap peas and red peppers. I can't wait to see Kat again. Hopefully I will see her at BEA or at another book event!

Photo credit of the OTSP Secret Sisters: Kat

I want to thank BTAF for putting together an amazing festival this year and I would like to thank the ladies at On the Same Page for pairing Elizabeth, Kat and I for our last round of OTSPSecretSister!