Call for Manuscripts

Submitting a Manuscript:
Manuscript submission guidelines are available on p. 2 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 .

Winter 2017: Story and the Development of Moral Character and Integrity
Submissions due on or before July 1, 2016
As lovers of literature, we want to believe that, through books, adolescent readers may gather insights and knowledge that support their efforts to make sense of themselves and others. That while accessing worlds they might never know, they broaden their perspectives and experience vicariously decisionmaking processes that parallel those encountered in their lived realities. And yet, if fiction has the power to achieve this good, might it also have the capacity to engender the bad?
It might be true that “It’s a lot easier to be lost than found. It’s the reason we’re always searching and rarely discovered—so many locks not enough keys” (Sarah Dessen, Lock and Key , p. 365). We might “envy the trees/ that grow/ at crossroads./ They are never/ forced/ to decide/ which way/ to go” (Margarita Engle, The Lightning Dreamer , p. 138). But sometimes we need to consider the difficult possibilities, and “sometimes the best way to find out what you’re supposed to do is by doing the thing you’re not supposed to do” (Gayle Forman, Just One Day , p. 125).
We invite contributors to consider the complex moral interactions that might occur when adolescent readers enter a text, particularly one intended for them as young adults. Can young adult literature (YAL) foster opportunities for readers to assess what might be right and what might be wrong—and who decides? Can YAL provide avenues for exploring dark, forbidden paths? Can YAL reinforce or challenge belief systems contradictory to those grounded in democratic values of equity and social justice? Can YAL foster more empathetic and nurturing dispositions and behaviors among young people? Or are we overestimating the power of story?

Summer 2017: The World of Young Adult Literature
Submissions due on or before November 1, 2016
The world of young adult literature extends beyond the United States. And yet, readers in our nation are not often invited to consider stories published in or written about other lands, cultures, and communities. While the United States is rich in diversity and the field is increasingly recognizing the need to share stories for and about all readers, we are a single nation on a globe inhabited by many. We wonder what might be gained from increased exposure to a wider array of young adult literature that lies beyond our national borders. We wonder, too, what challenges exist in finding, publishing, and teaching such titles and how we might address these with care and humanity.
To that end, we invite contributors to consider the stories of adolescence that are written around the globe and to tackle questions related to international literature, both broadly and narrowly defined. What common experiences, realities, and ways of knowing, doing, and being exist across cultures? What differences might reveal our biases—and enhance our understandings? Are cultural differences ever too big to bridge? Whose stories get published—and whose remain untold to a larger community? What role do translators play in telling stories to new audiences? Can literature unite people across distant places? Is it true that “Even when you got crazy people or drunk people on buses, people that went on stupidly, and shouted rubbish or tried to tell you all about themselves, you could never really tell about them either” (David Almond, Skellig , p. 13)? Or can story help us know an unfamiliar somebody a bit better? Although “two mountains can never meet, . . . perhaps you and I can meet again. I am coming to your waterfall” ( Edwidge Danticat , The Farming of Bones, p. 283).

As always, we also welcome submissions focused on any aspect of young adult literature not directly connected to these themes.