Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Attention M.T. Anderson fans

SCBWI-Oregon just let us know that the dashing and brilliant M.T. Anderson will deliver Multnomah County Library’s eighth annual Teen Author Lecture on Monday, Oct. 12.

He was just in Seattle last year, and anyone who missed him might consider the trip to Portland.

Anderson is the author of the Printz and National Book Award-winning The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, as well as Feed, Burger Wuss, The Game of Sunken Places, Whales on Stilts, and other popular and critically acclaimed titles.

In an interview with School Library Journal, Anderson said that writing his dystopian novel Feed, featuring a kind of future Internet that connects Americans via computer chips implanted in their brains, made him realize that “there were years of teen resentment waiting to burst out—anger about all the things the media demanded we become.”

Anderson has written picture books, middle-grade and young adult novels that cover a wide range of topics, genres and settings – from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first, from biography to historical to adventure to fantasy and science fiction. He explained his varied interests to Kirkus Reviews: “I tend to get fixated on subjects serially, and I often write about them to exorcise my interest. I also believe firmly in forcing yourself to do things you think you can’t do, things
you’ve never done before. The world is a dazzlingly varied place — why should we assent to limiting ourselves?”

The Teen Author Lecture will take place at The Old Church, 1422 S.W. 11th Ave., Portland. Doors open at 6:15 and the lecture begins at 7 p.m. Tickets ($10 adults; $5 students K–12) are on sale through Oct. 12 at Central, Gresham, Hillsdale, Hollywood, Midland and North Portland libraries; Library Administration; and A Children’s Place, Annie Bloom’s Books, Broadway Books, Green Bean Books, Looking Glass Books and Powell’s City of Books. To order tickets by mail, call 503.988.5402.

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