The first booksellers trade show of the fall 2026 season, New Voices New Rooms, took place August 2–5 in Baltimore. The conference was jampacked with programming, with scores of children’s and adult writers—from debut authors to beloved fixtures on the national literary scene—who connected with booksellers at parties, receptions, and other special events presented by the New Atlantic Booksellers Association and the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance.

Two panels held on August 3 were dedicated to children’s authors, beginning with a morning session, “Stories for all Ages,” with Beth Ferry (The Sea Glass Girls, illustrated by Ji-Hyuk Kim; Clarion, Apr. 2027), Lamar Giles (Say Less; Scholastic, Feb. 2027), Jason Douglas Griffin (Be the Acorn, Roaring Brook, Sept.), and Elisabeth Kamakawiwoole (The Seventeenth Quest, illustrated by Louise Hurst; Knopf, Mar. 2027).

The subsequent Children’s Luncheon Panel, “Writing for the Next Generation,” featured SIBA board president Julia Davis of the Book Worm Bookstore in Powder Springs, Ga., who moderated an intense and thought-provoking conversation among two YA authors and one middle grade author. Their discussion covered everything from life, love, loss, mental illness, and grief, to the thought processes that culminated in the books that they were presenting at NVNR: Gayle Forman (Two Thousand Hours of Us; Quill Tree, Mar. 2027), Frederick Joseph (Everything’s Not Lost; Viking, Oct.), and Daniel Nayeri (This Is a Door; Stonefruit Studio, Oct.).

“I want to dive into the meat of the conversation first,” Davis told the three authors. “The title of today’s panel is ‘Writing for the Next Generation.’ When you think about the next generation, what do you think young people most need from books today?

Referencing a former colleague of his, a children’s book editor, Nayeri responded by pointing out that “children are no less intelligent than adults, but they’re far less informed. They have just as rich of an interior life as we do. They have the same complex emotions, but they might not know yet the word for it. And so much of great writing is giving them that first experience of naming an emotion, without dumbing it down.”

Forman added that “there’s a reason that storytelling is part of the social human animal experience,” whether it be oral or written. “For all of us, it’s exactly what Daniel has said: through these stories, we can begin to understand the things that are already there in us. For young people, in particular, there’s something about feeling less alone, feeling connected to what you’re feeling in a book.” Forman explained that when she goes through a “really profound period,” she realizes, through reading, that what she is experiencing is not unique to her. She feels “part of a larger community of people. And that’s one of the amazing things I think we all do with our books: we get to have that conversation and community with people we may never meet.”

Joseph noted that young people today have more access to information than ever before in history, “but they also have more access to pain, hostility, and confusion. Most of us in this room have never experienced what they are experiencing right now.” Disclosing that he wrote Everything’s Not Lost in honor of his mother, who died by suicide due to mental illness, Joseph said that his memory of her inspired him to work on a book about healing. “I wanted to write something that a teenage girl might be drawn to, because I wanted to read the book that [his mother] didn’t have,” he said of the YA novel about Ella, a Black teenager from Harlem who has bipolar disorder. Acknowledging that he is not a teenaged girl, Joseph explained that “countless teen girls, I think 70, [were] readers before any of you will ever have seen this book.” A primary goal for him as a children’s book author, he said, is that he wants young people “to be okay with just not being okay.”

Nayeri said that his latest middle grade read, This Is a Door, about a boy, Ing, who leaves home to search for his parents, as well as to find some meaning in his life, was inspired in part by school visits. He often asks children to share something that they know they are good at doing, he said. “It can be, I am the one who knows how to juggle, or make people laugh. But I’m often looking at the kid whose answer is, I’m not good at anything. I don’t let them know, but that answer is terrifying.” This Is a Door is for those children who think they have nothing to offer their communities, he said. “That’s the question at the heart of this book about a young man who thinks he’s dull and uninteresting and he has nothing that he’s good at. How do we find our purpose? That was the question that came out of listening to that aching in the hearts of a lot of children.”

Joking that Two Thousand Hours of Us was the first book she’s written in which “nobody died,” Forman said that she focused on Nicolette, a teenaged girl’s first experience of love and heartbreak during a period for her personally of “pretty intense anxiety.” She considered her writing “terrible,” as she started working on seven or eight books that she gave up on, except for what became Two Thousand Hours of Us. During the revisions, she realized that “the patina of [her] depression” had infused the novel, and thus she “dialed back” and rewrote it “from page one” as a love story.

“There’s an idea that when you become an adult, you no longer feel emotions as strongly as young people,” Forman said. “That’s not true. Adults never learn to regulate emotions: we just stuff them down. Part of the appeal of children’s books for adults [is that] we all feel things very strongly and it allows this sort of release. That’s why these books are so powerful.”