Here’s my post about ALA Annual Conference Opening, The Printz Awards, and Day 2.

June 30, 2024, was the Sunday of ALA Annual Conference in San Diego this year, and it was time to meet our Morris Award Winner and Finalists! Well, those who made it, anyway. Pictured above are winner Byron Graves in the center, with Hannah V. Sawyerr and Ari Tyson beside him.

I can’t begin to tell you how lovely it was to celebrate our winning authors. The William Morris Award is for the best young adult debut book of the year, and as a committee we read hundreds, discussed them, and came to a strong consensus about our Finalists. It’s especially wonderful to get to encourage these stellar writers at the beginning of their careers.

So the first event of the day was the YALSA Awards. We got to hang out with the authors in the green room beforehand, and then celebrate the winners with other YA book enthusiasts.

My pictures from a distance came out blurry in the fairly dark room, but let me give some good lines from the various winners.

First up was our winner, Byron Graves, for Rez Ball. (*Such* a good book! Read it, everybody!)

He said that he wrote the book so that a 16-year-old Ojibwe kid like he had been could now see himself in a book. He also gave credit to his mother, who “crafted and freestyled” bedtime stories.

The next award was the YALSA Excellence in Nonfiction Award, won by Dashka Slater, for Accountable: The True Story of a Racist Social Media Account and the Teenagers Whose Lives It Changed.

Her book started in the signing line for The 57 Bus, when someone asked her if she’d heard about this incident. And though she very much wanted to write about sweetness and light this time, the story wouldn’t let her go. She wanted to understand what had happened and why, and she very much wishes it had become irrelevant.

Almost all the high schools she’s visited had incidents of online hate – disguised as humor. Kids are having conversations about it. She doesn’t write for teens because she has answers, but because she has questions.

After the Alex Awards were announced (no authors were there), it was time for the Margaret Edwards Award Winner to speak. This award is given for lifetime achievement and was given to Neal Shusterman.

His speech made our jaws drop.

It started innocuously enough. His father wouldn’t read his books because they’re fiction. But he maintains that Fiction is the single most important thing we have.

At 18, he bought the Writer’s Market. He sent 20 copies of his first book to 20 publishers, and they were all rejected.

“Writers today are losing the benefit of soul-crushing rejection. We need to be reminded we haven’t arrived.”

His second book got him an agent, Andrea Brown. She couldn’t sell it. His third book sold when he was 23. “This author is gifted and in serious need of therapy.”

The goalpost has to keep moving. He wrote the Scythe trilogy to disrupt teen dystopia, to show a future when mankind really was getting things right. He came up with Scythe at the end of 2012, after his Mom had a stroke. Dying in the hands of people you love is not the worst way to go.

Then he began talking about Identity. Our identity comes from our people, or it’s forced on us by society or it’s something we choose. It defines who we are, who we love and hate, our whole world. And identity is a fiction.

Isn’t it wild that fiction defines our lives? Take great care in the stories you tell yourself and others.

Then he told the jaw-dropping story about his own identity. He grew up believing he took after a grandfather who was a Sepphardic Jew. But ten years after his parents had died, his son did an Ancestry DNA test – with surprising results that motivated research – and he learned that he was half Black and half Scotch-Irish. So that gave him lots of thoughts about identity.

People tell writers to stay in their lane, and his lanes go every which way now.

There are three kinds of diversity:
We need all kids to see themselves.
We need all writers to be able to speak.
We need all to be able to put themselves in other people’s shoes.

We are all human beings. Every story is our story to tell. He’s chosen a narrative where this is additive in his life.

After the awards celebration, we Morris Committee members who were there got to have lunch with Byron and Hannah! It was a wonderful time. They signed books for us, and we signed one book for each of them. *smile*

After lunch, we walked back to the convention center. I just barely had time to make it to a program I’d been eyeing: Welcome to the Puzzledome! It was a sample program to show how to run a jigsaw puzzle competition! This is something I’ve long wanted to try. I was late, but got there before they started, and joined up with these two from a base library in Japan. Our team came in second place, finishing the 500-piece puzzle in One hour, five minutes. The winning team did it in 58 minutes, but they had four people, so we were quite pleased with ourselves.

So – I did something stupid. Incredibly stupid.

I used the words “Covid positive” in my original post about my ALA Conference attendance.

Someone found this post just before I got on a plane to go home from San Diego. They had seen me at the conference – after I had tested negative – and because I wasn’t wearing a mask outside in the wind after I tested negative – they concluded that I had attended the conference giving people Covid willy-nilly.

Because I’d posted this picture (again, outside in the wind) from Day 2, they concluded that I’d completely lied that I’d ever worn a mask at the conference.

Before I say anything else, let me mention that none of these people in this picture – my fellow Morris committee members and the main people I talked with the first two days of the conference – got Covid from me, as they have reported two weeks after the conference.

By the time I got off my plane, Twitter was in a frenzy about me going to the conference and spreading Covid. They wouldn’t listen to anything I said about the precautions I took and the medical advice I got. I stayed off Twitter for a week and shut off notifications, because being a target of all that hatred and loathing was more than I could take.

My plan was to not post about the rest of the conference, because after I was Covid negative, I started meeting authors and taking pictures with them – but those folks will never believe it.

However, after the furor died down, I remembered that I *like* to post about the conferences I attend. It helps me make the most of what I learned and remember the wonderful people I interact with. So I’m going to post about the last two days of the conference – when I was Covid negative – and refer to this post if anyone objects.

And I figure my own blog is my chance to give the full story – which chance I did not get on Twitter. If people don’t believe me, I feel sorry for them keeping all that hatred and contempt in their hearts. I have been thankful that those who actually know me have backed me up when I discussed the situation with them.

Here’s how it started: I’ve caught Covid two times, and both times it was on a long plane flight with one stop. This time, thank goodness, it was on the way back from Germany instead of on the way there.

But the flight was only a week before ALA Annual Conference in San Diego.

So I assumed I wouldn’t be able to go, and I emailed my fellow Morris committee members. They answered to not give up yet. I made a virtual appointment with a doctor to talk about Paxlovid, which she prescribed. I asked her what she thought about whether I could go to the conference, and she repeated the current CDC guidelines that if my fever is gone for 24 hours and my symptoms are going away, I can carry on normal activities, wearing a mask. I told my friends I might be able to go, and they cheered for me.

I never had much of a fever – 99.5 at the highest. But I took Paxlovid and felt better quickly. By Wednesday afternoon, it was back to my normal of 97.4, and my symptoms had left. All day Thursday that kept up (and all through the conference, too – I brought my thermometer on the trip) and I felt fine on Thursday and spent the day packing my bags to go.

Now, my sister lives near San Diego, and we made a deal that I would only come to see her after I was Covid negative. Because passing people in a convention center or sitting next to someone wearing a mask is a lot less contact than staying in someone’s house, so we decided a stricter standard would apply. So I did bring tests, and I was negative by Sunday and went to her house Monday night – and it was after I was negative that I started meeting authors and taking pictures with them.

So, yes, I was still positive when I arrived at the conference on Friday. But I was very aware of that. And presumably after your fever and symptoms have left, you’re shedding a lot less virus. When my Morris committee friends came up to me at the Printz awards, I stood at a distance and kept my mask on to talk with them. Then Saturday when I saw them at a reception on a boat, we talked outside in the wind. Even if I were at the very beginning of the illness and shedding lots of virus, I fail to see how that virus could have transmitted to someone else in the wind on that boat.

And that’s the thing. There are some on Twitter who believe that I was responsible for every case of Covid that someone caught at ALA Annual Conference. But thousands of people arrived at that conference after taking a plane trip. Who is more contagious? The person with no remaining symptoms who’s wearing a mask, or the person who caught Covid on the plane trip to the conference but doesn’t know it yet and isn’t wearing a mask?

Now, when the Twitter furor erupted, I was paranoid I’d find out my committee friends had caught it from me. But time has passed, and the people I actually talked with and spent the most time with those first two days did not catch it from me. My family that I saw later that week did not catch it from me. I can’t bring myself to believe that I filled any of those convention center rooms up with virus and infected people I didn’t even talk with.

Though if you really want me to be your scapegoat, if you won’t believe me that I took precautions, and that I think those precautions were effective – there’s not really anything I can do about that. I now have new sympathy for teens who get bullied on social media, and I’m going to try to stay out of any social media shaming in the future.

So – that’s what happened. I followed CDC guidelines and went about my normal activities, wearing a mask, when my symptoms and fever were gone for more than 24 hours. After a swab up my nose didn’t even detect any virus, I no longer worried that I might accidentally infect someone.

Now I’m going to write up the rest of the conference without mentioning Covid, but this is my explanation if someone has an issue with what they see.