Nobody knows Kiera, an honors student and math tutor, is the game developer of SLAY, a virtual role-playing game with hundreds of thousands of players. When a teen in Kansas City is murdered over the game, SLAY starts to receive criticism. Specifically many begin to label SLAY as racist, exclusionist, and violent. What originally was a safe haven where Black gamers could duel as Nubian personas, is now being infiltrated by an anonymous troll that is threatening to sue Kiera for "anti-white discrimination." Can Kiera protect her identity and the game without losing herself?

Newbery Honor and Coretta Scott King Award-winning author Renée Watson shares with us the story of Amara, who is on her way to finally meet her Grandpa Earl and her cousins in person, in the great city of New York. However, the city is not what she expected it to be. As Amara explores Harlem and learns more about her father and her family, she realizes that home and family might be more complicated and more interesting than she expected them to be.

Joining us from the Holocaust Awareness Museum and Education Center, the Teen Author Series is proud to be hosting a Holocaust survivor to share their personal stories and experiences. While the specific speaker is to be determined at a later date pending availability, the event is confirmed so please do not hesitate to register.

Quiara Alegría Hudes was the watchful girl on the stairs while her family danced their defiance in a tight North Philly kitchen. She was awed by her Puerto Rican mother, grandmother, aunts, and cousins, but haunted by the silences, untold stories, and systemic injustices of el barrio. In My Broken Language, her musical memoir of searching for her own voice while coming of age in 1980s and 1990s Philadelphia, Hudes strives to become an artist and tell the stories of her family and community. She finds herself surrounded by many languages, in many forms-written and spoken, English and Spanish, bodies and books, Western art and sacred altars-as she navigates experiences of history, migration, spirituality, and home.

In this modern re-telling of the Greek myth of Orpheus, award winning author Lilliam Rivera explores how two contemporary teens deal with their own curses and blessings. Eury is spending the summer in the Bronx with her aunt after losing everything in Hurricane Maria, while an evil spirit, Ato, haunts her and wants Eury all to himself. Pheus is musically blessed, ready to have a carefree summer, but that changes when he meets Eury. While their romance begins, powerful evils aim to separate them, but Eury and Pheus will fight—for each other and their lives.

Told through ten stories of ten Black lives taken by racism, award-winning Philadelphia Daily News columnist, Solomon Jones tells the stories of real people whose lives and tragic deaths pushed the Black Lives Matter movement forward. Each story, each person shows specific instances of structural racism, and Jones offers meaningful and actionable strategies to change them. Jones previously taught creative writing at Temple University, worked as a columnist for the Philadelphia Weekly, and was on the boards of several committees to support people experiencing homelessness. These 10 demands in his new book form a plan that is necessary to repair our racist past, change the racist present, and bring justice to the future.