Linette Kim: How I Got into Publishing

Guest post by a NYC transplant from California working in School & Library Marketing at Bloomsbury Children’s Books

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Linette Kim

I got into publishing through the back door, so to speak.

Like just about everybody who works in publishing, books were a huge part of my childhood. It amazes me still that my parents, who were not well-to-do at all and had just moved to the States from Korea, somehow managed to mail-order picture books for me before I was even old enough to talk. Even more amazing, English isn’t their first language, so read-alouds weren’t exactly a part of our daily routine. Instead, when I was old enough, I would sit with these books strewn about the room, thumbing through the pages, making up stories based on the pictures.

Not surprisingly, middle grade was the most formative time in my literary life. More specifically, middle school was when I discovered Ann M. Martin’s The Baby-Sitters Club. This series did everything to ignite in me a passion for writing and reading, as well as a love of grammar!, that has only grown since. I am also amazed in retrospect at the diversity of the BSC cast—Look, minorities! On the jackets! As a reader, it didn’t occur to me to even think twice about this, nor did I appreciate it as much as I do now. I mention all this especially because I got to meet Ann M. Martin this very weekend at a Books of Wonder event, where both she, as well as Bloomsbury author and one of my favorite people in the world, Shannon Hale, were panelists. I didn’t think it was possible to get that emotional upon meeting a writer. I was wrong. And when I asked Ann for an autograph, the Newbery Honor winning author wrote, “BSC 4-ever!” Yes. I could have died.

Shirin Bridges: How I Got into Publishing

Guest post by Ezra Jack Keats award-winning author — and now Publisher of Goosebottom Books

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Shirin Bridges
Head Goose

I come from a family of storytellers. When I was growing up in Asia, the stories that my great-grandfather, my grandparents, and my parents told wove to form a matrix, a context for my life. Through stories I understood who I was and where I’d come from, and also where I could go.

One of those stories became my first picture book, Ruby’s Wish. It’s the tale of a girl in Old China who wants to go to university, even though girls weren’t taught how to read or write. The Umbrella Queen followed, about a girl from a Thai village where everyone paints umbrellas the same way. Of course, our heroine wants to paint hers differently.

So you see, my stories were about girls who found ways to do and be more than expected. Imagine my reaction, then, when I watched my niece disappear into a pink princess haze.

“Do you know there were real princesses who didn’t sit around waiting for a prince?” I asked her. There were princesses who changed their own worlds; ones too busy and too empowered to worry about being pretty or popular.

Book Spotlight: The Savage Fortress

One of my favorite quotations about children’s literature ever comes from the marvelous R. L. Stine:  “I believe that kids as well as adults are entitled to books of no socially redeeming value.” This doesn’t mean that the books in question aren’t good on an aesthetic level, of course. It just means some books don’t have to be anything more than FUN, delivering the big emotions readers crave at every stage of life, but especially as children and YAs:  the adrenaline of the fight scene, the thrill of the kiss, the shiver of terror that Mr. Stine renders so expertly. Quite often they’re genre books—fantasies or romances or horror or mysteries—or published in series, like my long-ago-beloved Babysitters Club books. They don’t teach anything, they don’t require too much work from the reader, they’re all about the pleasure of the experience . . . and the experience is awesome.

Historically, kids of color who wanted to see themselves in these kinds of books have had a hard time finding such stories. And on the flip side, books about people of color have often been presented under an aura of nothing but socially redeeming value, for the history they teach, the cultural information they impart, or the cross-cultural reader’s virtue in picking them up at all. But all of that has been changing, slowly but steadily, and I am now immensely proud to introduce you to a book with a hero of color, in a world drenched with color, and no socially redeeming value at all: The Savage Fortress, by Sarwat Chadda. 

Celebrating Diversity in Jewish Books for Children

Guest post by Barbara Bietz, Past Chair of the Sydney Taylor Book Award Committee, author, and creator of the blog Jewish Books for Children.

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By learning about other cultures through literature, we celebrate our differences as well as our commonalities. Books about different cultures offer young readers access to people whose backgrounds and religious beliefs may be unfamiliar, but through their stories readers establish emotional connections that foster understanding and compassion. Book awards that celebrate diversity help librarians, teachers, and parents identify excellent works that offer meaningful experiences to readers.

The Sydney Taylor Book Award

The Sydney Taylor Book Award, established by the Association of Jewish Libraries in 1968, honors new books for children and teens that exemplify the highest literary standards while authentically portraying the Jewish experience. The award memorializes Sydney Taylor, author of the classic All-of-a-Kind Family series about a Jewish family with five sisters growing up on the Lower East Side of New York City in the early 1900’s. Gold medals are presented in three categories: Younger Readers, Older Readers, and Teen Readers. Honor Books are awarded Silver medals, and Notable Books are named in each category.

Book Spotlight: Summer of the Mariposas

Guadalupe Garcia McCall
reading her debut title

It was tough choosing which of my Tu Books fall titles to share with you this week, as they're both awesome, and they're both diverse titles that I want all the world to know about. I had to draw straws, in the end, and Summer of the Mariposas won. This time.

Guadalupe Garcia McCall is known best for her debut novel in verse, Under the Mesquite, which was a finalist for a Morris Award--given for a debut novel--and which won the Pura Belpre Award. McCall carries that same poetic voice to prose in her second novel, a retelling of The Odyssey starring five sisters. I sometimes like to call it a Mexican American Weekend at Bernie's meets Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants via The Odyssey. Let me tell you why.

When Odilia and her four sisters discover a dead man floating in their swimming hole on the Texas side of the Rio Grande, their first instinct is to report the dead body to the authorities. But when one of the sisters, Juanita, finds a family photo in the dead man's wallet, their path is clinched--he was a father with two small children at home. They decide they will return the dead man to his family in Mexico, despite Odilia's opposition to this plan. Eventually Odilia is overruled and she joins them on the urging of the ghostly legend La Llorona, who tells Odilia that this quest is something the five sisters must undertake. La Llorona will be their guide. They pile into their father's old car and set off on an adventure to Mexico.

Comadres y Compadres Writers Conference

Las Comadres is a nationally known Latina organization empowering women to be actively engaged in the growing Latino/Hispanic communities through online and face-to-face networks. Its mission is to connect and empower Latinas everywhere through community building/networking, culture, learning, and technology.

Las Comadres, in collaboration with Medgar Evers College, CUNY: National Black Writers Conference, the Center for Black Literature, the Foreign Language Department and the Latino American Association present the Comadres y Compadres Writers Conference, which will provide Latino writers with access to published Latino authors as well as agents and editors who have a proven track record of publishing Latino writers.

Separate, Not Equal

An It's Complicated! — Book Covers guest post by author Coe Booth.

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Coe Booth

Like most writers I’m always a little — okay, a lot! — nervous about what my book covers will look like. After spending so much time writing the books, the fact that the cover image is out of my control leads to a great deal of anxiety. However, I was pleasantly surprised and happy when I saw the cover of my first novel Tyrell.

I really thought the photo of a teenage boy looking out onto his neighborhood would attract the attention of the audience I had in mind when I was writing the book — teenagers, especially boys, who don’t usually find a book that speaks to them. And I’ve since heard from lots of teens who tell me that it was the cover that initially drew them to the book.

The thing I never imagined was that the cover (and the covers of my subsequent books) might create an automatic ghettoization of my work.

I can’t tell you how many libraries I’ve been to where my books are not even shelved in the mainstream YA section. They are relegated to the shelf labeled “Street Lit” where the books about black people live. The same is true in some bookstores where a black person on a book cover means it’s no longer YA; it’s “Urban Fiction”.

I’m here to tell you, when it comes to books, segregation is alive and well in America.