Manuscript submission guidelines are available on p. 3 of this issue and on our website at http://www.alan-ya.org/page/alan-review-author-guidelines . All submissions may be sent to thealanreview@gmail.com .

Today’s young adult readers access and generate young adult texts in myriad forms. Through multimedia platforms, television and film adaptations, fan fiction, and social media, they engage with stories in ways that extend beyond the originals. These opportunities for connection are rich in potential and complication. Do media enrich our interactions with others and our world—or is there a falseness in this apparent linkage? Consider the perspective of Rainbow Rowell’s narrator: “There are other people on the Internet. It’s awesome. You get all the benefits of ‘other people’ without the body odor and the eye contact” ( Fangirl , p. 147). We wonder if all readers are inspired by techie texts or if some, in fact, imagine life as “an analog girl, living in a digital world” (Neil Gaiman, American Gods , p. 332).

For this issue, we encourage you to ponder and explore the ways in which you use young adult literature to help young people mediate media: How do you foster innovative engagement with media in your professional setting? What are the challenges of teaching and learning in the digital age, and how might they be mediated? How do digital communities invite and/or exclude young people today? What role does/can YA literature play in successfully navigating life in the “digital age”?

“To be careful with people and with words was a rare and beautiful thing” (Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe , p. 324). With these words, Sáenz points to the sacredness of language, particularly as we use that language to build up or tear down those we know—and those we don’t. We use language to discriminate differences and to make sense of and give meaning to our perceptions, but being discriminate can result in unfair judgment—both subtle and overt—when we fail to consider the unique stories of those to whom we assign our assumptions.

In this issue, we invite you to consider how language, woven through story, can invite exploration of difference centered on (dis)ability, sexual identity or orientation, gender, race, nationality, culture, age, and/or physical appearance. How might young adult literature help readers consider their own and others’ uniqueness? How might it challenge deficit perspectives of the other that are too often forwarded by the dominant narrative? What difficulties result from such attempts at engagement in educational settings? How can we help adolescent readers understand that “[A] person is so much more than the name of a diagnosis on a chart” (Sharon M. Draper, Out of My Mind , p. 23) and ask themselves, as they grow up in a labels-oriented world, “You’re going to spend more time with yourself than with anyone else in your life. You want to spend that whole time fighting who you are?” (Alex Sanchez, The God Box , p. 139)?

As always, we also welcome submissions focused on any aspect of young adult literature not directly connected to this theme. Please see the ALAN website ( http://www.alan-ya.org/page/alan-review-author-guidelines ) for submission guidelines. All submissions may be sent to thealanreview@gmail.com .