What follows is a guest post by Kate Henricks, a high school senior, swim team co-captain and avid teen reader.

I have always believed in the significance of books. Maybe growing up the daughter of both a book publicist and a journalist/author has given me a skewed viewpoint, but reading has always seemed pretty darn important.

I read my first proper novel in the first grade (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, if you’re curious) and never looked back. I’m an avid teenage reader, and like most, I’ve always believed that being so put me very much in the minority. However, last weekend at the Palmer Event Center, I learned that I was dead wrong.

The third annual Austin Teen Book Festival took place in downtown Austin, Texas, last weekend. The one day event gives a platform to some of the top young adult authors from all over the country to speak to their fans in panels based on their chosen genre and to sell and sign their various published works.

I missed the start of the festival due to some thrilling SAT testing, and thus didn’t get to see Scott Westerfeld’s presumably awesome keynote address. I did, however, get to see him speak about his new series, Leviathan, with the “Alternaworlds” panel, and he certainly did not disappoint. Also represented at the “Alternaworlds” panel were Rosemary Clement-Moore, Brian Yansky, Jonathan Mayberry, and Maureen Johnson. While they were all really personable and are all clearly talented people, each in their own right, I’ve got to say, Maureen Johnson and Scott Westerfeld stole the show. They got the whole audience laughing, and their excitement for their upcoming works was truly infectious. I was glad Maureen Johnson was so lovely in person since I am a big fan of her books, and it would have been really disappointing to find out she wasn’t as great in person.

The other panel I visited was dubbed “I Heart Love Stories.” This panel was comprised of Cristina Garcia, Simone Elkeles, Jenny Han, Stephanie Perkins, Jennifer Ziegler, and Christina Mandelski. I arrived before most of the authors were seated at the panel, but it was still almost impossible to find a place to sit. By the time they started speaking, there were people vying for the best standing room behind the back row. I knew, along with seemingly everybody else at the festival, that this would be good.

The variety of the people who made up the tremendous audience is also worth noting. About halfway through their talk, the panel started taking questions from not only teenage girls, but teenage boys, a little girl who couldn’t have been older than 10, and even a woman, who stood up and prefaced her question by noting she had just received her master’s degree in literature. That last question was probably my favorite and easily the most moving of the day. The woman talked about how she had been forced to hide her love of romance novels because she was looked down upon for it in college. At this, Stephanie Perkins and Simone Elkeles just about leapt out of their seats, begging to take the question. Perkins spoke first, telling us about being in college and hearing constantly that wanting to be a YA author was shameful and showed lack of aspiration. She told us she spent seven years writing her first novel, Anna and The French Kiss, because she was writing it as an adult novel, and that wasn’t the story it was supposed to be. “Be true to yourself and write what you want” was her point. Elkeles spoke next about the letters she’d received from readers saying that reading her books had turned their entire lives around. That, she said, meant more to her than the approval of any college professor ever could. The passionate defense from these two women made me love Perkins even more and really got me wanting to pick up a few of Elkeles books.

The last event of the day was the book signing, and this is where I really started to understand how wrong I’ve been about teenage readers being a minority reading group. The authors stepped out and were greeted like rock stars by lines of readers that went the length of the auditorium and then wrapped around the back wall.

While waiting in line, I met a fellow Nerdfighter (fan of John Green’s books and video blogs), who also wrote about the festival in her blog, The Book Nut. Standing there talking to her, completely surrounded by hundreds of other readers clamoring to get their books signed, gave me complete faith in my generation. We are a generation of young readers, who – dare I say it – are even more enthusiastic than those that came before us, and we will continue to keep books alive.