Last weekend, I went to the Philadelphia Science Festival as a speaker.
The Franklin Institue, all festooned with helix balloons!I kind of felt like I was giving a TED talk, with the secret microphone pack in the back of my pants and all. I felt very Beyoncé. About as Beyoncé as I'll ever get, probably!
This was the only acceptable photograph of dozens that my family took.
Man, I make some really goofy faces when I talk. I also got to teach a few high school classes at the Science Leadership Academy, on science fiction character creation, which was so fun! Go STEM students!
Two lessons I learned as an author? That teens still love the idea of merfolk. And also, they love it when teen main characters are outcasts, but have that one BFF to rely on. ;)

I may have spent an entire evening making Shrinky Dinks with my family. Talk about a blast from the past! It was super fun.

We also witnessed a gorgeous rainbow while we were visiting. I'd never seen such vivid colors before. The indigo and violet stripes were really there!

And finally, though I wasn't able to participate as much as I would have liked since I was at the Festival, the #WeNeedDiverseBooks campaign happened last week. It was such a necessary and wonderful grassroots effort to raise awareness of the need for diverse books in children's and YA literature, as well pull those diverse books that are already out there into the spotlight.

Here's my contribution that day:

To read more about #WeNeedDiverseBooks, read here and here .

And also, see how the campaign helped add a Diversity panel to BookCon!

If you want to know how I feel about diversity as a POC author, I wrote this very honest post at the Diversity in YA blog. And I'll also be speaking about it upcoming at RT.

Speaking of which...RT is this week!

I'm pretty excited. I'll be on a bunch of panels and signing books, so if you're there, please tweet me @LydiaYKang  #RT2014 so we can say hello!
Tuesday May 13, 10:55 PM-11:55 PM: YA Spooky Sleepover PartyWednesday, May 14, 1:15 PM -2:15 PM: YA: "The Total Experience: Diversity in YA" PanelWednesday, May 14, 3:45 PM-4:45 PM: InterGalactic Bar and GrilleThursday, May 15, 11:15 AM-12:15 PM: SCI-FI: It's Not Easy Being Green: Writing Non-Human CharactersFriday, May 16th, 10:00 AM-11:00 PM: Mind, Bodies and Believability: Turning Science into FictionSaturday May 17, 10:00 AM-2:00 PM: Book signing in YA AlleySaturday May 17, 6:45 PM- 8:00 PM: Teen Day Party For more details, click here for my full RT schedule.  Hope to see some of you there! Have a great week!