36th Annual SCBWI Summer Conference...

I was very excited when the mail arrived in my inbox yesterday because it included the (snazzy) brochure for the 36th Annual Summer Conference, an impressive shindig SCBWI throws every August in (the really nice part) of Los Angeles.

Here are a few cool things about this year's conference:

• New tracks and series of sessions are offered including Creating the Series, Increasing Your Revenue & Books Sales and Poetry Master Class with Lee Bennett Hopkins, along with tracks for illustrators and published attendees.
• Four contributors to the 2008 CWIM are on the faculty: author Kathleen Duey, Delacorte editor Krista Marino, Henry Holt associate art director Laurent Linn, and the Class of 2k7.
• Other cool presenters such as Cecil Castellucci, John Green, Cynthia Leitich Smith.
  
• If all goes well (my fingers are crossed), the conference will be the first place the 2008 CWIM is available.

If you have the time and budget to attend this event, I highly recommend it. If you can't, I'll give you the play-by-play right here. (If you'd like to read my account of conference goings-on from last year, visit August 2006 in my blog archive. I kicked off my blog at the event!)