Industry Q&A with author Lisa Yee

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

 

Warp Speed is about a Star Trek geek who is bullied every day. I wrote it because during an assembly a boy said, "I need to know what happens to Marley."

Marley was a minor character in Stanford Wong Flunks Big-Time who is bullied. Later, the boy's teacher told me that he had never spoken in class before -- that he was just like Marley.

I had no plans to write that book, but after a couple of years, I couldn't forget that boy, and I knew I needed to write Warp Speed.

Do you think of yourself as a diverse author?

No. I just think of myself as an author whose characters reflect what I see around me.

Who Will Create the New Normal?

An It's Complicated! — Book Covers guest post by Elizabeth Bluemle, a children's book author, blogger for Publishers Weekly, and owner of The Flying Pig Bookstore in Shelburne, Vermont.

---

Elizabeth Bluemle

 For sixteen years, I’ve been a bookseller in small-town, semi-rural Vermont, in a region that is progressive but fairly homogenous. I spend a lot of time introducing people to new books I think they might love, and over the years, I’ve encountered the usual range of responses from white customers to books with brown faces on the covers. Many of these responses are positive; some are reluctant or downright resistant, and represent mistaken assumptions about these books, that they are limited in focus and applicable only to a narrow, nonwhite audience.

I’ve got a toolbox full of tactics I use with hesitant customers, from subtle to overt, depending on how the situation reads. By emphasizing plot and character, by getting them to “forget” about race, I can get the adult excited about the story. I say adult deliberately, because out of the thousands of kids I’ve recommended books to, only a handful have ever shown even an awareness of the race of the cover character, much less a resistance to difference.

But the resistance is not entirely the reader’s fault. The extreme lack of diversity in children’s books (if it were hunger, it would count as starvation) — both featuring people of color as main characters and books published by writers of color — has led readers to some justified perceptions. For a long time, brown faces on covers by and large signaled certain kinds of stories: slavery, Civil Rights, gritty urban plight, outsiderness. The problem wasn’t with the stories themselves, of course; these were powerful, enriching, worthy books. But they were funneling nonwhite experience into particular tubes, and if readers were in the mood for something else—adventure or fantasy or mysteries, say—they looked elsewhere. They had to; there were few other choices. And that is still largely the case, with a few noteworthy, marvelous exceptions.