Each year, YALSA and Baker and Taylor give away two grants of up to $1,000 for a librarian to attend ALA Annual Conference for the first time. Seattle librarian Laurie Amster-Burton won the Baker & Taylor Grant in 2009. In this podcast, she shares her experience at ALA Annual, including attending events, going to the exhibits, meeting teens and other YALSA members, and more.

In addition to the Baker & Taylor grants, YALSA gives more than $40,000 in grants and awards to its members each year. Learn more and apply by Dec. 1 at www.ala.org/yalsa/awards&grants.

In this YALSA podcast, Matthew Moffett interviews YALSA's new Blog Manager mk Eagle. In the interview Matthew and mk discuss mk's experiences:

• As a new high school librarian
• In library school
• As an active participant in online social networks

mk also gives some advice to library school students who are getting ready to enter the library work world. Along with reading mk's posts on the YALSA blog you can follow her on Twitter at @mkeagle and read her posts on her personal blog and on the Examiner.com.

In this podcast, Best Books for Young Adults Chair Summer Hayes talks about the importance of the BBYA Teen Session, held at Midwinter Meeting and Annual Conference. Afterwards, listen to teens from the Annual 2009 session talk about their favorite nominees for the 2010 list.

See the full nomination list online at http://www.ala.org/yalsa/booklists/bbya. Thanks to YALSA intern Thiru Selvanagayam for creating this podcast.

Jill Whitson, a YALSA member, speaks to Thiruchelvan Selvanayagam about what it's like to have your library sponsor a WrestleMania Reading Challenge finalist and encourage a reluctant teen to start reading. Jill's student designed a bookmark that earned him a spot in the WrestleMania Challenge finals. He didn't win, but he did get to attend WrestleMania and Jill won $2,000 for her library's teen and tween collection.

Listen in to find out more about her experience. Want to register for the 2009-2010 WrestleMania Reading Challenge? Sign up through Teen Read Week registration by this Friday and you could relive the experience Jill describes in this podcast.

In this podcast, Michael Cart interviews Lizzie Skurnick author of the just released Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics we Never Stopped Reading. Lizzie is the author of the blog Old Hag and is a columnist for Jezebel. Listen The podcast discussion covers:

• Shelf Discovery
• The range of human experience covered in many teen novels.
• How teens read and what they get out of reading realistic fiction
• Books including Secret Lives by Bertha Amos, Jacob Have I Loved, Phyllis Reynold Naylor's Alice series, and The Dreadful Future of Blossom Culp
• Reasons why novels for girls and women do not receive the respect they deserve and boy vs. girl readership of teen fiction.
• Skurnick's career & the readership of her Jezebel columns
• The future of print reviewing and the changing world of reading in electronic and print formats.

Matthew Moffett and Pam Spencer Holley discuss the new book Pam edited for YALSA, Popular Reads for Teens, and the history of some YALSA book lists. The book compiles information from Popular Paperbacks for Young Adults and Quick Picks for Reluctant Readers along with annotations and program ideas.

Michael Cart interviews Margo Rabb author of Cures for Heartbreak and The Missing Persons series. The conversation includes discussion of:

• Rabb’s New York Times essay, I'm Y.A. and I'm O.K. on the cross-over in books between teen and adult.
• Short stories for teens and novels written in short story format.
• The challenges of writing fiction and writing autobiographical fiction.
• The definition and re-definition of young adult literature.
• Literary novels for young adults.
• Adult and teen cross-shelving of materials in bookstores and libraries.

In this podcast Linda Braun talks with YALSA President Sarah Debraski about National Library Legislative Day. Listen or subscribe to YALSA's podcast feed. (Note: YALSA has a new podcast feed. You will want to update your podcast subscription in order to know when a new YALSA Podcast is available.) In the audio Sarah talks about her experiences along with:

• Talking with legislative staffers about LSTA funding
• YALSA representatives visits to the Pew Internet in American Life Project, IMLS, and the Internet Education Foundation
• Ways for teen librarians to keep up with important legislative issues and get involved.

To find out more about Sarah's Library Legislative Day experiences read her blog post from earlier this month.