Wednesday, July 3, 2013

Diversity in the News

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!

Illustration by Tina Kugler to show the lack of diversity
in children's literature in 2012.
 
ON OUR RADAR

NEW RELEASES

BOOKLISTS

EVENTS
This Month
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

1 comment:

  1. 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.

    Within 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.

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