"Almost everyone has times when they don’t like the way they look."

If you live in SoCal and love YA books, then YALLWEST is one of the best days of the year. It’s as simple as that. This yearly Santa Monica book festival is a full day of raucous, outrageous, and wonderful bookish activities centered on teens. Almost 25,000 of them, in case you’re curious. Fourteen of this year’s attendees were teen interviewers from PickMyYA, some of them returning veterans from last year’s event but most of them first-time attendees. After nearly twelve hou

Hey there! Welcome back to another amazing round of #BeyondTheBio questions here at PickMyYA. Today’s guest interviewer is Brian. He’s a high school freshman who's a proud member of vocal group and is the tallest person in his family. He loves jazz, and his all-time favorite book is Laurie Halse Anderson's The Impossible Knife Of Memory. Our second guest today is L.L. McKinney, author of A Blade So Black. In addition to being a poet and author, Elle’s a gamer, Blerd, and adam

Whether you’re celebrating Easter, Passover, or 4/20, we here at PickMyYA are so glad you decided to spend part of your holiday weekend with us. We’ve got another awesome #BeyondTheBio planned for today, featuring an interview all the way from the other side of the world. Our first special guest today is teen interviewer Jay C. They’re a high school freshman who loves K-Pop and is trying to learn Korean and Japanese. They’re also an aspiring young writer whose all-time favori

We’ve spent this entire weekend hiding books around The LA Times Festival Of Books as part of our #BookScavengerHunt, but we’re not done yet. We’ve got another giveaway planned for today, and it’s just for you! As part of today’s #BeyondTheBio, we’ll be mailing out a copy of the Susan Kaplan Carlton’s moving new book In The Neighborhood Of True--out this Tuesday. Keep reading to learn more about the book, the author, and the way you can win! But, first, let’s introduce our te

It’s been a fun week here at PickMyYA! After an exciting finish to #BookMadness, we’ve finally got a winner. And we’ve been working on some fun surprises for next weekend’s LA Times Festival Of Books. Be sure to follow us on Twitter or Instagarm if you’re a fellow SoCal book lover who will be at FOB! You don’t want to miss what we’ve got planned! Today, we return with our weekly #BeyondTheBio series which features YA authors in conversation with teen readers. We’ve got two sp