Overcoming Adversity in YA Fiction
Kirk Van Brunt, Gloria Muñoz, and Ari Tison
Saturday, November 7, 2026
2:00pm, Red Cap Room
As teenagers become increasingly aware of the complexities of the adult world, they are often thrust into the chaos, injustice, and bureaucracies that work to keep people down. Three new YA novels show how teens can derive strength from their heritage, friendship, and their own resolve to overcome those challenges.
Kirk Van Brunt’s Fight Song introduces Nokes, a cynical Indigenous teen hockey player who, with help from a friend, escapes a dangerous situation in the foster care system. Gloria Muñoz’s They Called Us Wicked follows a secret coven of witchy friends who are determined to resist an oppressive anti-magic establishment in order to find a missing girl. Ari Tison’s Together We See is a thoughtful thriller set in Costa Rica that pits a high school student and her brother against kidnappers, loggers, and the local government while searching for the truth behind their land-activist father’s mysterious death. Join us as these authors present their young protagonists and the better futures they are striving to create. (Ages 12 and up)
About the Authors
Kirk Van Brunt is a lawyer and writer currently living in Maryland. Growing up, he lived outside the town of Nespelem on the Colville reservation in Washington State, where his father was a tribal leader for many years. Kirk is the author of the young adult series The Cracked Chronicles, among others.
Gloria Muñoz is the author of They Called Us Wicked and of the poetry collection Danzirly, which won the Ambroggio Prize. She is an Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate Fellow, a Hedgebrook Fellow, an Esperimento Sul Respiro Fellow, a Macondista, a Highlights Foundation Diverse Verse Fellow, and a part of Las Musas. Her debut novel, This Is the Year, a YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults title and winner of the International Literacy Association’s Young Adult Book Award, was hailed as “brilliantly layered” by Booklist in a starred review. She lives in Minneapolis with her family.
Ari Tison is the author of the hybrid YA book Saints of the Household (FSG, 2023) which won the Walter Dean Myers Award, Pura Belpré Award, and Américas Award, and waslauded by Kirkus Reviews, School Library Journal, Booklist, and the New York Public Library, among many other major recognitions. Her poems and short works have been published in numerous magazines, including Poetry’s first ever issue for children, and her poem “The Storyteller Gets Her Name” is part of a national grade-school curriculum reaching millions of young readers. With Ty Chapman she co-edited the recently released young adult anthology Witness: Poems to Address the Past, Present, and Future of Policing (Zest Books). Ari belongs to the Bribri tribe, one of the eight recognized tribes of contemporary Costa Rica. She lives in the Twin Cities with her sons and teaches at Hamline University’s MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults.