ChLA 2013 Conference Play and Risk in Children’s and Young Adult Literature
ChLA 2013 Conference Play and Risk in Children’s and Young Adult Literature

Summary/Abstract: This is a report of the ChLA 2013 Conference Play and Risk in Children’s and Young Adult Literature held in Biloxi, MS, USA. The 40th annual conference of the Children’s Literature Association (ChLA), hosted by the University of Southern Mississippi (USM), took place from 13 to 16 June 2013 at the IP Resort in Biloxi, Mississippi. Organized in collaboration with the ChLA, the USM Department of English, the USM de Grummond Children’s Literature Collection at McCain Library and the USM University Libraries, the conference encompassed 14 concurrent sessions involving 80 panels with presentations from over 250 international scholars. The central topic of this year’s ChLA conference was play and risk, as these two notions have been interconnected with children’s literature as both a literary and scholarly endeavour from its very beginnings. Ever present as a theme in many classic and contemporary works of children’s and young adult (YA) literature, play and risk have proven to be very relevant concepts in the risky venture of constructing a scholarly discipline around a literary field once considered to be mere children’s entertainment (or rather, ‘children’s play’).

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