Wendy Lamb: How I Got Into Publishing

My fourth grade teacher wasn’t surprised that I wound up reading for a living, because I gave 250 book reports that year.  All I wanted to do was read. I had a terrific fake cough and would use that to stay home from school with a pile of books. 

I grew up in New Canaan, Connecticut and my family was close to the family of Maxwell Perkins, the great editor at Scribner’s. Max had died before I was born, but I grew up knowing what an editor was. Max’s daughter, Bertha Perkins Frothingham, shared my passion for books and encouraged my reading in every way. One of my favorite books was A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline  L’Engle, which led me to take physics in college. I struggled with that course, but when I botched a lab my professor let me write a story related to physics, which became my first published story. As a creative writing major, a job in publishing seemed like the right path.  

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.

Dan Ehrenhaft: How I Got into Publishing

Nearly twenty years after the fact, I still can’t believe this really happened.

It was May 1993, and I was a senior at Columbia College. Like many of my friends, I had nothing concrete planned for post-graduation. I knew that I wanted to work in children’s publishing, only because I still loved reading “children’s books” at age 22 (everything from Jon Scieszka’s recently published Stinky Cheese Man to S.E. Hinton and Lois Duncan) and I also knew that I’d like to write a book for kids someday.  But I hadn’t interned at a children’s publisher; I hadn’t reached out to potential mentors; there weren’t even any children’s bookstores on the Upper West Side.

Three days before graduation, I panicked. This was pre-Internet. There were no listservs or search engines; my only choice was to go where all the uninformed and desperate went...The Columbia Job Board.  (I’ve since written about The Columbia Job Board in a novel because it still seems too strange to have truly existed: A giant length of cork smothered in alphabetized post-its.)  The only listing under PUBLISHING, CHILDREN’S read: Write cover copy for Sweet Valley High novels!  There was more—involving the actual nature of the job—but to this day, that’s all I remember.

Diversity 101: The Transgender Perspective

Contributed to CBC Diversity by Cris Beam

I was honored when I was asked to write a Diversity 101 post about transgender identity. Honored and a little daunted. Because while I’ve written two books on the topic, I’m not transgender—and speaking about always ends up becoming speaking for. Which is part of the problem with gender representations in general: who gets to speak for whom? Especially in children’s literature where gender variance is, well, not so variant yet, I know I’m walking into hot water. The scarcity of GLBT (accent on the T) depictions yields strong opinions as to how we should talk—and write—about the few transgender characters we have. 

People used to say that transgender was an umbrella term to encompass all kinds of gender variance—from drag king to transsexual to the little boy who wears tutus to play with his trucks. While the umbrella concept’s fallen out of favor somewhat, the core idea is useful: there are a myriad of ways to express one’s sense of self.  Transgender is fundamentally an internal identity wherein one’s understanding of self is different from the body one was born with. The expression part is separate, and can range from wearing different clothing to undergoing medical procedures to doing nothing at all. The bottom line is, only transgender people can decide that they’re trans, and it’s up to the rest of us to support and celebrate that.

The Gender Divide

Not only is CBC Diversity concerned with increasing the representation of all youth in the books that they read, but the initiative is also concerned with the make-up of the children's book publishing industry and creating a representative and equal environment in the workplace. Publishing, similar to librarianship and teaching, has the appearance of being a very female-saturated industry but, if what the following infographic illustrates (courtesy of Learnstuff.com) can be applied to all industries, it might be interesting to see just where the publishing world fits in.

Liz Waniewski: How I Got into Publishing

While at Boston College and trying to decide what I wanted to do with my English major degree, my parents asked me, pre-Avenue Q, “What do you do with a BA in English? Because you are not moving home.” (Well, this is how my 20-year-old brain interpreted a very loving conversation about the importance of being able to support yourself and not needing to depend on anyone else to live the life you want to live.) 

And I realized that I wanted to get paid to read. Actually, I wanted to get paid to read books for kids because the books I read growing up shaped me and touched me in ways that nothing else could. Diana Wynne Jones, Lloyd Alexander, Beverly Cleary, Judy Blume – these were authors who didn’t know me but somehow understood me. They made me feel connected to people, places, and ideas that were new, different, and bigger than my own world. To be part of the process of bringing a book to life for someone else to connect with, well, that was my dream job. 

Philadelphia’s 21st Annual African American Children’s Book Fair

The African American Children’s Book Fair is one of the oldest and largest single day events for African American Children's Books in the region. Over 3,500 people attended the event in 2012 and over 20 nationally known bestselling authors/illustrators will participate in the Fair’s events this year, many of which have won the American Library Association Coretta Scott King Award. 

The African American Children's Book Fair will be held on Saturday, February 9, 2013 from 1-3 PM at the Community College of Philadelphia located on 17th Spring Garden Street in Philadelphia, PA. The event is free and opened to the public.