There's a conference on the fantastic in the arts coming up that I just found out today has extended their paper deadline, if anyone's interested. Deadline is tomorrow, so you'll want to contact the coordinator right away if you're interested. It's not just children's and YA; there are about seven different tracks including fantastic literature in English, the fantastic in film and media, etc. It sounds more academic than publishing-related, but it still sounds fascinating.
I gave them the info on my paper on George MacDonald (the Princess books), and they snapped it up. There's someone else doing a paper on MacDonald and she said it would be great to juxtapose them against each other. So it looks like I'm going! (So it doesn't necessarily have to be on blurring the boundaries.) This is the organization that publishes the academic journal
The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts. Never looked at it, but it sounds interesting.
http://www.iafa.org/26th Annual International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts Children's and YA Literature Division
Blurring the Boundaries: Transrealism and Other Movements
March 16-20, 2005
Wyndham Fort Lauderdale Airport Hotel
The focus of ICFA-26 is on the the breaking and blurring of the boundaries between between reality and illusion, between the 'real'world and the possible worlds of the imagination.
Of special interest in Children's and YA fantastic  literature are "metatexts", books where books are part of the story, as in the works of Garth Nix, Cornelia Funke, Michael Ende. Other authors of interest include Phillip Pullman, J. K. Rowling, Joan Aiken, Madeleine L'Engle, and any author who uses elements of the fantastic, including science fiction and horror, to tell stories for children and young adults.
As always, we also welcome proposals for individual papers and for academic sessions and panels on any aspect of the fantastic in any media.
The updated deadline for submissions is November 30, 2004. Please contact the Division Head, Mary Harris Russell, at
[email protected].