Welcome to Introducing YASA! This series of blog posts is all about getting to know the YASA executive board members. In this entry, we chat to our Social Media Coordinator Emily Booth and appreciate her post-thesis-defense flowers.
her final PhD presentation in July 2020.
What’s your research area in three keywords?
Teenagers, power, diversity
What’s the most under-rated YA novel that you’ve loved?
Final Draft by Riley Redgate. It’s about a passionate teenage writer who is pushed to breaking when her super supportive English teacher is replaced by a pretentious literature academic. It’s such a nuanced interrogation of how we all value stories differently.
Where is the best location to read?
Somewhere soft–bed, or a cosy armchair.
What’s your favourite beverage/snack to have while reading?
A mug of green tea.
What is your favourite YA tv/movie adaptation?
To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before. It really captured the feeling of the books!
What’s a YA on your TBR that you’re excited to read?
Dr Anna Whateley’s Peta Lyre’s Rating Normal. A brand new, debut Australian YA!
What would your teen-self think of your current research, in a few words?
She’d be glad that someone is picking the fights that she always started in her English classes!
What’s one YA that you’d love every teenager to read?
E.K. Johnson’s Exit, Pursued By A Bear. I gave a conference paper on it–it’s so powerfully written, and such a testament to the strength in solidarity.
If you weren’t a YA scholar, what other kind of YA practitioner would you be? (librarian, bookseller, author, publisher etc…)
I’d definitely be a YA specialist bookseller. This is sort of cheating, because I am a YA specialist bookseller. Oops!
What is your favourite YA trope?
I love all “teenage girl becomes queen/empress/ruler of the world” stories. If you promise me that ending, I’ll follow the story through pretty much anything!
Thanks for chatting, Emily!
Contact Emily on emily.booth@uts.edu.au or on Twitter at @uncoverallure.
Emily Booth is a final year PhD candidate at the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia. Her research explores how teenagers respond to adult influence on their reading practices in the contexts of leisure reading, school reading, and industry engagement. She has published widely on diversity in Australia’s young adult fiction publishing industry and interviewed over 50 YA authors at public events. In 2019, she was awarded the UTS Social Impact Grant in-full for her project, ‘Investigating the publication of Australian picture books by and about people from diverse communities in 2018’, in partnership with Australian advocacy group Voices From the Intersection. She is the inaugural student member of the UTS Human Research Ethics Committee and the first internationally-based contributor to global readers’ advisory service NoveList. She has also been a specialist children’s and young adult fiction bookseller since she was a teenager herself.
