KC Teen Plaza Issues

I'm a co-author! I seriously wish this was a blog post about my first journal publication, but it's not. It is  a post about a report I co-authored entitled Youth Flash Mobs in Kansas City: Causes, Consequences and Recommendations by Houston, Seo, Kennedy and Knight. It has gotten press in the Kansas City Star, the St. Louis Post Dispatch, and the Lawrence Journal-World. I particularly like the article by Lynn Horsley in the Kansas City Star. She did an excellent job.

Also, I co-presented the report to the Kansas City Parks and Recreation Department with Leigh Anne Taylor Knight and that was fun! I wore a suit. Not kidding. It was neato. I think I was always hoping my research would help someone somehow, but only expecting that I would have to settle for helping other academics. It is really exciting to be able to contribute to the public discourse. Yay!

Parker's Beware the Wild

So, grad school is moving along swimmingly. I turned in two finals this week and now all I want to do is dance. The end of the semester is not my only good reason for partying like a wild woman. One of my best friends EVAR, Natalie Parker just got a two-book deal for her debut young adult novel, Beware the Wild. Here's the Publisher's Marketplace announcement (which I thank my graduate advisor for emailing around).

Natalie Parker's BEWARE THE WILD, pitched as Twin Peaks meets The Village, in which a claustrophobic Louisiana town is dominated by its sinister, encroaching swamp, which swallows up a boy who is instantly forgotten by everyone except his sister, and replaced by a mysterious girl from the past who is intent on taking over his family and his life, to Phoebe Yeh at Harper Children's, in a good deal, in a pre-empt, in a two-book deal, for publication in Winter 2014, by Sarah Davies at the Greenhouse Literary Agencyy (NA).
Foreign: info@rightspeople.com

Is that fabulous, or what?! Yes, now I will know two amazing young adult authors in this one little college town. Life is truly grand.

Non sequitor: I love summer. Pool parties are second best to dance parties.