Date, Location
Meet the Authors
Teens! This is your chance to meet best-selling authors Lisa McMann and James A. Owen, the featured speakers at the 2009 Youth Literature Seminar.
Lisa McMann, author of the New York Times bestsellers Wake and Fade, has wanted to be a writer since 4th grade in Holland, Michigan. She likes to cook, swim, read, and hang out with her kids. She also loves watching reality TV shows, even the sappy ones that make her cry, and she says, “I’m not afraid to admit it.”
She came up with the idea of a girl getting sucked into other people’s dreams when she “dreamed that I was in my husband’s dream, watching what he was dreaming about.” She’s planning one more title about Janie, the Dream Catcher, and boyfriend, Cabe – Gone, due in February 2010.
Illustrator and storyteller James A. Owen was best known for his Starchild comics and books before publishing Here, There Be Dragons, the first in the Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica. He’s a big fan of mingling the fantastic with real history and describes his life as “Always moving forward to build a New Mythology.”
He says, “I am a voracious reader, and consume print by the truckload. Fiction, nonfiction, comics, graphic novels... I love it all.” His favorite authors include Ray Bradbury, Madeleine L’Engle, Lloyd Alexander, and Orson Scott Card. The Shadow Dragons comes out in October.