Overcoming Adversity in YA Fiction

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)
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Centennial Fictions
Moderated by Lorna Landvik
In 1926, Prohibition was in full swing, and the fledgling film industry was about to undergo a major technological transition with the advent of “talkies,” and St. Paul’s Union Depot held its Grand Opening as one of the nation’s largest and most impressive rail terminals. Now two Minnesota authors take us back to the mid-1920s in vivid novels that sound clear echoes today: In Matt Goldman’s The Prohibited, a trio of brothers in St. Paul must forge a new livelihood when their family liquor store gets shut down by the Feds, while Glenn R. Miller’s Rough Cuts focuses on the seismic changes at the movies as a Hollywood director faces a righteous Midwest censor. Join us as these acclaimed novelists discuss how the moral ambiguities and social order of a century ago have rippled across the decades.
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Poetry Summit
Our 2026 Poetry Summit honors three amazing literary artists, all from LGBTQ+ communities, who through rigorous poetic form and deep engagement with subject matter address mortality and grief, the capacity of compassion to emerge from the sometimes lonely islands of self, and the pressing need to bridge the divides that separate humans from their natural environment and their cultural underpinnings. Kazim Ali brings us The Man in 119, an exploration of absence that grapples with questions of place and faith in the wake of his mother's passing, asking where we go when we leave this world: “earth or sky or memory only.” Robin Becker, widely considered the foremost feminist poet of her generation, joins us to celebrate Midsummer Count: New and Selected Poems, which collects five decades of essential and influential work on childhood, nature, art, sex, friendship, and loss. Soham Patel's The Daughter Industry: A Hauntological Confession, Alternative History, Speculative Autopoetics in Three Acts with Seven Players is a prismatic meditation on survival, a choreopoem of resistance and queer desire that critiques narrow and punitive views of gender even as it evinces joy, play, dance, spirit, somatic and ekphrastic ways of knowing. Whether raw and candid or wildly surreal, these are poets driven to expand poetic discourse via connection.
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