June 27th – July 3rd, 2013
We hope everyone has a wonderful 4th of July and to tide you over until the next Diversity in the News post (July 12), we're giving you one mid-week!
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Illustration
by Tina Kugler to show the lack of diversity
in children's literature in 2012. |
ON OUR RADAR
- DC's Politics & Prose panel on children's books diversity -- video with Meg Medina (VIDEO) at P&P’s Tumblr
- How to Use Amazon's Categories to Find Hidden Latino Gems at Latinas 4 Latino Literature — about adult books, but it's really interesting how the amazon metadata can be harnessed
- Pride Week Guest Post from Nora Olsen: A Short History of Gay YA via Write All The Words!
- “Becoming a Prose Poet” by Inside Out and Back Again author Thanhha Lai at the TeachingBooks.net blog
- Not All Trans People Feel “Trapped In The Wrong Body” via Buzzfeed LGBT
- Life on the other side / La vida en el otro lado via Latinas 4 Latino Literature — author and illustrator Duncan Tonatiuh's TED talk in San Miguel de Allende
- One Thing Leads to Another: An Interview with Malinda Lo at YALSA’S The Hub — “Writers are responsible for the words they put on the page, including diversity or the lack thereof.”
- Author Interview With Tara Sullivan About Her Debut Novel Golden Boy at Through the Wardrobe
- DiversiTheme: Writing diverse kidlit, with Karen Sandler (author of the TANKBORN trilogy) at Diversity in YA
NEW RELEASES
- Since You Asked… by Maurene Goo (Scholastic, June 25)
BOOKLISTS
- Marching to Freedom | New Titles on India’s Struggle for Independence at School Library Journal
- Children's Books About the Immigration Experience at Latinas 4 Latino Literature — a list of children's books that put the immigration experience "into a form that kids can truly understand."
EVENTS
This Month
- June 28—September 22: Witness: The Art of Jerry Pinkney at the Philadelphia Museum of Art
Upcoming
- July 6—August 17 in NYC: La Caza Azul Summer Pop-Up Shop — the pop-up shop will carry approx. 300 books, roughly 50% of those being bilingual children's books
Over the 4th of July weekend, I posted this infograph on our Facebook page. I publish the site Latina Lista, a general news site for English-speaking Latinos — and also a content sharing partner with CBC Diversity.
ReplyDeleteWithin an hour of posting the infograph, we had 8,000 people looking at it and a list of comments via both Facebook and Twitter. Conversations were happening simultaneously at another Latino-focused site.
Mainly outrage was expressed. Yet, some proposals on how to combat the indifference towards Latino children from mainstream children's book publishers were offered:
1. Support small independent Latino-centric book publishers.
2. Promote and nurture more Latino and Latina children's book authors.
3. Boycott mainstream children's book publishers.
By the end of Saturday night, almost 20,000 people had seen the infograph, and that's only Latina Lista's numbers.
This display of emotion illustrates not only an increase in anger about the lack of diversity in the children's book publishing industry but that today's parents, teachers, and students themselves, are no longer content to stand on the sidelines and lament.
The readers of Latina Lista are readers of action and it doesn't bode well for the children's book publishing industry to continue on its current course if they want to remain relevant to a growing demographic that is increasingly realizing that the only way to shift power is to do it themselves.