The 5th annual Tweens Read Book Festival was held October 3, 2015 at South Houston High School in South Houston, TX.  The goal of the Tweens Read Book Festival is to celebrate and promote reading by connecting tweens with authors.  The day featured an opening keynote by Gene Luen Yang, a National Book Award winner for Young People’s Literature, a closing keynote conversation between Katherine Applegate (a Newbery award winning author), Rebecca Stead (a Newbery award winning author), and Tweens Read co-director and CUIN clinical associate professor Margaret Hale.  

“Organizing this festival helps me to further my professional mission of connecting kids, teachers and librarians to books and authors and helping improve literacy across the greater Houston area,” said Hale.  “It was our biggest festival yet!”

The day also featured 5 panels of authors.  In each panel the authors briefly introduced their latest book, and then volunteer moderators facilitated a question and answer session between the students and adults attending and the authors on each panel.  For a full list of authors attending please visit the Tweens Read Authors page.

Approximately 1,000 middle school students from public, private, and charter schools, home schooled children, and university students and faculty attended the festival representing 38 school districts.  Some elementary and high school students were part of the audience as well.  

Hale worked to recruit both undergraduate and graduate students from the UH College of Education as volunteers so that they could enjoy the experience and have the opportunity to interact with tweens and celebrated authors.  “It allows me to model the kind of passion for literacy that I hope to see in all of our inservice and preservice teachers,” said Hale.

“We are very proud of Dr. Hale’s involvement with Tweens Read,” said CUIN department chair Jennifer Chauvot. “Under Dr Hale's leadership, this program continues to grow. This event benefits our student teacher candidates by introducing them to the world of literacy through the authors and the 5th – 8th graders they will be teaching in the future.”

A group of local educators from various school districts and private schools helped Hale organize the event which she co-founded along with Julie Mulkey, the librarian at Bobby Shaw Middle School in Pasadena, Texas.  South Houston High School has hosted the event for the past three years. Pasadena ISD was the event's previous host.

This year Tweens Read received financial support from the Barbara Bush Houston Foundation for Literacy, Phillips 66, and Abydos Learning International.  The Tweens Read organizing committee partners with Bluewillow Bookshop to bring in the authors.  Tweens Read is now an official 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation.

The goal of the organization is to connect 5th-8th grade tween readers to local and national authors and illustrators; encourage interaction between aspiring tween writers and established authors; educate, enrich, inform, and entertain local tweens and other participants; celebrate the educational benefits of tween reading and writing; and ignite a passion for reading and writing in the tween community.

Please enjoy photos from the event which can be found at the Publisher’s Weekly website.