TLA Awesomeness

I've spent the past week in beautiful San Antonio, Texas for the Texas Library Association conference.  As always, I've come back feeling refreshed and renewed and loaded with tons of great new ideas to enhance my library.  Here are just a few of the too-many-to-name highlights from the week:

• Meeting new librarian friends and sharing ideas
• Seeing "old" librarian friends and sharing ideas
• Listening to/meeting/having conversations with amazing authors
• the Nerdy Book Club session.  Amazing.  Inspiring. 
• Presenting with the fabulous folks that make up the #txlchat moderators
• Being inducted as the District 8 Secretary for the 2014-2015 year
• Spending my birthday at the conference.  ;)
• Great sessions on everything from creating your own cons to making poetry exciting and relevant to lists of new books to read and pass on to my students
• The amazing publishing houses and other vendors that are so generous to us at the conference.

As always it was a great time, and I'm still a bit on information overload in the best possible way.  I love learning and growing in my profession!

With author Jason Reynolds.
When both Sharon Draper and Laurie Halse Anderson describe someone as the
 next author to watch, you take note!

TLA book swag!

Oh the Horror!  author panel with some amazing folks (why yes,  Kami Garcia and Jonathan Maberry are up there!)

"Lead out Loud" was our conference theme---and author James Patterson was our first keynote speaker.