Interview with Miranda Kenneally
1. Was there any certain moment you had as a teen that you feel changed your life?
-- Yes. When I was 18, I made a decision to leave Tennessee and go to college in Washington, D.C. I would be leaving behind everything I knew and didn't have any money at all. I went in to see the school guidance counselor and she told me that I would probably fail if I went to DC, so I might as well stay at the local community college. That's when I made the decision that I was never going to let anyone tell me how to live my life or hold me back.
2. If you could give your 15 year old self one piece of advice, what would it be?
-- Eat better! I didn't know much about nutrition or healthy food choices until college.
3. Looking back, is there something you would have changed about your teen years?
-- I wouldn't have spent so much time pining over the wrong guys, especially the one that hooked up with me and then went and hooked up with a friend of mine. I should've been open to dating other people.
4. What do you feel are the biggest challenges teen face today, compared to what we experienced a few years ago?
I think teens today are under pressure to do a lot more homework than in the past. Teens are challenged to work harder than ever before. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but I wish that teens had time to have lots of fun and make mistakes and do crazy things. You don't only learn from reading books. You learn from life experiences. I think that adults in America work crazy hours and feel stressed a lot, and if we continue down this path of Doing Way Too Much Stuff and Working Too Much, it will only get tougher on our kids.
Dear Teen Me
Published: Zest Books (October 30th, 2012
Reading Level: Young Adult
Paperback: 192 pages
Dear Teen Me includes advice from over 70 YA authors (including Lauren Oliver, Ellen Hopkins, and Nancy Holder, to name a few) to their teenage selves. The letters cover a wide range of topics, including physical abuse, body issues, bullying, friendship, love, and enough insecurities to fill an auditorium. So pick a page, and find out which of your favorite authors had a really bad first kiss? Who found true love at 18? Who wishes he’d had more fun in high school instead of studying so hard? Some authors write diary entries, some write letters, and a few graphic novelists turn their stories into visual art. And whether you hang out with the theater kids, the band geeks, the bad boys, the loners, the class presidents, the delinquents, the jocks, or the nerds, you’ll find friends--and a lot of familiar faces--in the course of Dear Teen Me.
Zest Books website: http://zestbooks.net/dear-teen-me-blog-tour/
Dear Teen Me website: http://dearteenme.com/?page_id=4031
Dear Teen Me events page: http://zestbooks.net/events/
Zest Books Dear Teen Me book page: http://zestbooks.net/dear-teen-me/
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