It Doesn't Have to Be True to Be Truthful

An It's Complicated! — Authentic Voices guest post by author, Alex London.

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Authenticity, that vicious guard-dog of truth, bedevils a teller of stories every step of the way. It is not enough to feel the truth of what you write or even to know it. The reader must feel you are right in the telling of it. An inauthentic voice can make even an honest memoir feel like a lie, while an authentic voice can make a whole pack of lies seem true. Just look to James Frey’s first book for proof of that.

In writing my YA debut, Proxy, I struggled with authenticity early on. As a gay man who was once a gay teen, I had no trouble with my protagonist’s sexuality. I well-remembered the unrequited longings, the suppressed desire for a kiss that sometimes broke out as rage, and the feeling, ever-present, that my sexuality did not define me and that I could not let the world tell me it did.

Syd, one of two main characters in Proxy, contains much of the truth of my own experience and the challenge there was the common challenge to all writing: to make sure I rendered him as vividly as I would want to be rendered myself. I had memories to draw on, fragmented conversations with my straight best-friend, felt truths that I could, with effort, put into words.

Diversity in the News

July 25th – August 2nd, 2013

NEW AT CBC DIVERSITY THIS WEEK

• Guten Tag! My trip with the German Book Office by Connie Hsu, editor, Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

CBC DIVERSITY/COMMITTEE MEMBERS IN THE NEWS

• Editor Namrata Tripathi: The Exclusive #LA13SCBWI Team Blog Interview at I’m Here, I’m Queer, What the Hell Do I Read?

ON OUR RADAR

• Spanish Magazines for Kids Hit Mainstream at Latinas 4 Latino Literature -- Cricket now offers some of the only Spanish-language magazines for kids
• A Book that Looks Like My Family (VIDEO) on Huffington Post Live – Host Nancy Redd invites Erica Perl (from First Book), Deborah Heiligman (author), Todd Parr (author) and Cara Lemieux (journalist) to weigh in on diverse families in children’s lit
• Writing Race in Novels: The Audio Version by Mitali Perkins (Bamboo People) – 10 tips for writing race in novels

Diversity in the News

July 11th - July 18th, 2013

CBC DIVERSITY/COMMITTEE MEMBERS IN THE NEWS

• Children's literature lacks diversity, say authors, librarians at The Tennessean – includes thoughts from Alvina Ling, Executive Editorial Director at Little, Brown Books for Young Readers and CBC Diversity Committee Member

ON OUR RADAR

• Kids React Adorably To Cheerios Ad That Sparked Racist Backlash (VIDEO) at the Huffington Post
• Related:  The Cheerios ad (VIDEO); an interview (VIDEO) with the young star of the ad and her family about the controversy on MSNBC
• Part IV: Are All Book Covers Created Equal? Bank Street 6th-Graders Talk With Knopf Editors!
• Has ‘Caucasian’ Lost Its Meaning? at the New York Times
• 'Fat Angie' Author Reaches Out to At-Risk Kids at PW – the author has embarked on an At-Risk tour, using her book as a springboard for “conversations with at-risk youngsters, including those who are economically disadvantaged, bullied, and LGBTQ.”
• Community Angered by Tossed Black History Collection at School Library Journal

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.

Diversity in the News

June 20th – June 27th, 2013

NEW BLOG ALERT

• July 1—31: Disability in Kidlit —Organized by Kody Keplinger and Corinne Duyvis, the blog series  “will feature posts by readers, writers, bloggers, and other peeps from the YA and MG communities discussing disability and kidlit.” Call for bloggers now closed.

ON OUR RADAR

• As Demographics Shift, Kids' Books Stay Stubbornly White via NPR’s Code Switch
• Why Hasn’t the Number of Multicultural Books Increased In Eighteen Years? (includes infographic) at Lee & Low Books – features opinions from Kathleen T. Horning, Director of Cooperative Children’s Book Center (CCBC);  Poet/Author Nikki Grimes, Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop, Professor Emerita, The Ohio State University, and more
• Related: Coloring Outside the Lines: The Diversity Gap in Children’s Literature via Bookriot
• Roger Sutton from Horn Book weighs in: A very good question

Writing Sympathetic (Gay) Characters

Originally posted on the Diversity in YA blog by Brent Hartinger.

If you’re an author, how do make and keep your main character sympathetic?

You could write a whole book on this very topic — in fact, many have. I confess, I find it a fascinating one, mostly because it was exactly this idea of “likable” protagonists that made me start writing fiction in the first place.

Some writers reject the whole notion that main characters must be sympathetic (and to a degree, I would agree: jerks and anti-heroes absolutely have their place in the world, in certain kinds of stories).

But when I started writing back in the 80s and early 90s, I found myself completely frustrated by the main characters in so many books I was reading, especially the gay books. I was looking for characters I could relate to, and too many of the ones I was reading were way too whiny and self-destructive for my taste.

My partner and I used to joke that there was a name for the genre: *sshole fiction.

Diversity in the News

May 30th – June 6th

ON OUR RADAR

• Gendered covers are failing young adult readers at The Guardian
• UK's first black children's laureate: new history curriculum could alienate pupils at The Guardian
• Why Aren’t More Mexican Children’s Books Making it to America? at Publishing Perspectives – Patricia van Rhijin, director at CIDCLI, discusses the problems getting Mexican children's books published in the US. American publishers are "so square," she says.
• Related: A Mexican Conundrum at Fuse #8
• The Truth About Multicultural Stories at The Rumpus
• When the Personal Becomes Political – 2 books that “don’t overstate the obvious but bring a deeper awareness of race, white privilege, and the messy business of transforming society one mind at a time.”
• Guest Blog by Zoraida Córdova at Diversity in YA – Mermaids in America, or, how does this Ecuadorian girl end up writing fantasy?
• A Short List of Great Resources for Racial Diversity in Young Adult Sci-Fi at BitchMedia
• LGBT: The Next Generation by Bill Konigsberg at Diversity in YA

Diversity in the News

May 9th—May 16th, 2013

ON OUR RADAR

• White kids will no longer be a majority in just a few years at CNN
• Where Are All the Black Boys? by Varian Johnson
• See The Fascinating Evolution of Cover Art From 12 Legendary Queer Books at Autostraddle – including Annie on My Mind
• In Our Own Words – YA author E.M. Kokie on how girls in YA novels rarely describe their own bodies using anatomically specific words
• Celebrate YA Books That Feature Haitian Culture at YALSA’s The Hub
• Pictures, Patterns, Words by Lyn Miller-Lachmann at Diversity in YA
• Author’s Notebook | Leslea Newman at The Whole Megillah
• Is UK Publishing Too “White, Middle-Class” to Be Truly Global? at Publishing Perspectives
• No censorship: Northville Schools refuse to remove Anne Frank from reading list via Hometownlife.com
• Trash Can Days by Teddy Steinkellner – review at Pink Me – addresses depictions of race in YA
• DiYA Author Spotlight: Laurence Yep at Diversity in YA
• Black In America: A Story Rendered In Gray Scale – NPR books on the  need for coming-of-age novels that address race
• 2013 Middle Grade Black Boys: Seriously, People? at Fuse #8
• DiversifYA: Kristina Pérez – interview with the author of The Myth of Morgan La Fey (Palgrave Macmillan) and A Hedonist's Guide to Beijing; also see this week’s interview with Tamara Mataya
• YA books need to reflect our diverse society at The Telegraph
• A Few Hints About the Japanese Literature Challenge 7 Coming This June at Dolce Belleza
• Two-in-One Notebook Special | Author Leanne Lieberman and Editor Sarah Harvey, Lauren Yanofsky Hates the Holocaust at The Whole Megillah
• 10 YA Books About Southeast Asian Americans at Diversity in YA

Slam Poetry: Asking Authors to Get it Right

Below we'll show two clips of Rachel Rostad who, from her Facebook page, "is a sophomore at Macalester College, studying English, Anthropology, and Human Rights and Humanitarianism. She began slamming during her first year of college, and made the nationally ranked Macalester poetry slam team in 2012, when she was seventeen years old. That year, the team took 2nd place at college nationals. Now, a year and a half later, she is a two-time champion of the St. Paul Soapboxing Last Chance Slam and has performed her poetry across the nation".

The first clip is entitled: To JK Rowling, from Cho Chang.

Diversity in the News

March 21st – March 28th, 2013

ON OUR RADAR

• A New Way for Gay Characters in Y.A., in the Atlantic Wire
• What Makes a Good YA Coming-Out Novel?, via the Horn Book
• On Spies and Purple Socks and Such – Harriet the Spy as queer text, via the Horn Book
• Thread about whether biracial/multiracial/mixed POC characters are more common in YA than POC with a single ethnicity, via Diversity in YA
• "Speak the Language." -- Children's Book Illustrator E.B. Lewis Shares His Emotional Work and Words, from How to Be a Children's Book Illustrator
• 5 Things Meg Medina Learned While Writing YAQUI DELGADO, via Diversity in YA
• New blog alert: Rich in Color is dedicated to promoting young adult fiction starring people of color or written by people of color.
• Sesame Street’s “Maria” Opens Girls Write Now’s Reading Series by Shelley Diaz at SLJ
• At YALSA’s The Hub: History of American Women through Books

A Skin Not Your Own

Originally posted on the Diversity in YA blog by Laura Goode

I like to call my YA novel, Sister Mischief, the world’s first interracial gay hip-hop love story for teens. It’s hardly news to anyone reading this blog that young adult literature has historically suffered a dearth of queer protagonists and strong, whole characters of color. Including those identities in my novel was important to me, but as a white woman who’s in a committed relationship with a man, part of me wondered, am I entitled to borrow these skins?

While I was writing SM, I thought a lot about a phenomenon I’ve come to call the Good White Person Syndrome (GWPS). GWPS involves not just being a honky with positive values about race, but more sensitively, figuring out how to convey to others, especially people of color, that you are not a racist like Bad White People are. To be a GWP, you must banish the following phrases from your vocabulary:

“Some of my best friends are [insert non-white ethnicity here].”
“Can I touch your hair?”
“[Insert non-white ethnicity here] babies are SO ADORABLE.”
“No, but where are you FROM?”

Industry Q&A with author Bill Konigsberg

Tell us about your most recent book and how you came to write it.

My most recent novel is Openly Straight. It will be published by Arthur A. Levine Books (Scholastic) in June of 2013. I came to write it because I was exploring the coming out experience for LGBT folks like myself. I wondered why it is that gay people have to constantly label ourselves in a way that seems to overshadow every other aspect of our identities, and how unfair it is that we must continue to do this all our lives. I was interested in the idea that we are being dishonest if we choose to highlight a different label. I felt (and feel) that there are tons of books about the process and value of "coming out," but precious few about what happens after we do.

 Do you think of yourself as a diverse author?

As an author who believes there is great power in diversity of thought and experience, I am definitely a diverse author. In my first novel, Out of the Pocket, I wanted to make sure that my cast of characters reflected the diversity of our culture. In that novel, my main character is a gay Caucasian male. His best friend, Austin, is half Mexican and half Caucasian. His other best friend, Rahim, is African American. I do think that there is a tendency in young adult fiction to whitewash our culture, which may relate to the fact that a high percentage of YA authors are white. In each of my books, I make a point of showing racial, ethnic, and sexual diversity. I do this because I think it is so important for teens to see themselves reflected in literature.

A Year of Thinking About Diversity

Guest post by Malinda Lo, author of several young adult novels including Ash, Huntress, and Adaptation.

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In 2011, my friend and fellow YA author Cindy Pon and I put together a national book tour called Diversity in YA. Our goal was to showcase middle grade and young adult novels that featured diverse characters; specifically, characters of color and/or LGBT characters. For this tour, Cindy and I traveled to five U.S. cities and invited local authors who had written diverse books to join us at bookstores and libraries to talk about diversity and what it meant to us as writers and readers. As part of our tour, we also launched a website, Diversity in YA, where we featured guest posts by authors and book lists of diverse titles.

In the two years since Diversity in YA, Cindy and I have continued to get feedback from readers and librarians and book people about how much they valued DiYA. This is so rewarding to us to hear! This is also why I was excited to hear about the launch of the CBC Diversity Committee. I think it's wonderful that the publishing industry is now directly involved, through CBC Diversity, in making sure this discussion about diversity continues — and hopefully in ways that will make a real difference in children's literature.

The Diversity in YA website, like the tour, was only meant to be live for one year, so we shuttered it at the end of 2011. When CBC Diversity asked Cindy and me if they could repost some of our DiYA posts, we thought this was a great way to give those posts a second life. That's why I and some of the other authors who wrote for diversityinya.com have given permission to CBC Diversity to reprint our posts on the CBC Diversity blog over the next several months.

The last piece I wrote for DiYA was called "A Year of Thinking About Diversity," in which I described what I'd learned during the DiYA experience. Although some of the piece is focused on the specific issues Cindy and I dealt with while managing DiYA, my thoughts about diversity and publishing remain largely the same. I'm happy to repost it on CBC Diversity today.