CBC Diversity
Month
In my search for more appropriate literature, I became acutely aware of the lack of young adult literature available that echos my students’ lives. Because these students are not necessarily the population that buys books, it was hard to find voices in literature that celebrated them. The publishing world has come a long way in offering a variety of voices to fill out the American teen experience, but we still have a long way to go.
I approach the issue of diversity from the perspective of someone raised as a religious minority in the United States. A religious minority with very strong views (some of which it continues to hold today) about those who do not fit its paradigm. So I have a bit of experience being both outside and inside a dominant power structure. If you prefer a less political analogy, I spent of a lot of my early years negotiating my path between competing worldviews with their own claims to priority and attention.
The book I go back to over and over again when wrestling with these issues is A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf. The book opens with the author confronting the great, massive, mustachioed, history of British Learning. It continues as a consideration of the writer’s struggle to assert the right to a reading and writing identity that is uniquely her own. Reading this book in my early teens was revelatory, giving me the permission to choose my own reading identity and communities. I did not have to be bound by the lists my school gave me, or the interpretation of books my teacher endorsed. I could begin to build my own reading room.
The single story creates stereotypes and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story. — Chimamanda Adichie
Ironically, there are still teachers in this country who find it perfectly ok to ask a black child to act out a slave auction – the danger of a single story. There still are teachers who do not read books by authors of color because they feel those books do not coincide with their curriculum; again, the danger of a single story. Not too long ago, I hosted a forum at my school for librarians, publishers, and diversity directors. The guest speaker was a multiracial Canadian woman who basically got up and told her story. One of the librarians came to me afterwards and said, “Her presentation was geared more for kids.” My response? “If we are not willing to hear the stories of adults who are different from us, how will we be able to assess what is good for our young people.” You fill in the blanks.
Or this:
What would you pick?
Here we go again! As part of CBC Diversity’s ongoing effort, we’re pleased to present the third dialogue in the “It’s Complicated!” blog series starting later today, this time addressing the sales and marketing of multicultural books.
The following voices inside and outside the publishing industry will each contribute one blog post to the series over the week, addressing how to market multicultural books to teachers, librarians and, ultimately, kids. The guest bloggers will also be participating in the open dialogue in the comments section of the site:
Our first “It’s Complicated!” blog dialogue in May 2012 addressed a topic that has arisen frequently at the Diversity table — the concept of responsibility and authenticity when writing about diverse characters and how authors, editors, and agents can choose/write stories that reflect the diverse nature of our society.
Our second “It’s Complicated!” blog dialogue in September 2012 addressed a topic that had been bubbling up for quite some time — book covers and the faces and aesthetic choices we see and/or do not see on the front of picture, middle grade, and YA books.
As always, we urge everyone to participate in what we hope will be an informative and insightful conversation. We really appreciate hearing from you, our readers, through the comments section of the posts about the parts of the discussion that you feel are most important and want to talk further about.
After much deliberation from within the CBC Diversity Committee, the CBC Diversity Goodreads Bookshelf will now be open to publishing houses who are not members of the Children’s Book Council. For the past year, the CBC Diversity Goodreads Bookshelf has only listed books from the member publishing houses of the CBC. Now, the list will be open to publishers not a part of the Children’s Book Council in order to continue to highlight the range of culturally diverse books in existence.
The CBC realizes that if this list is to operate in much the same way as our other lists, then the opportunity for publishers who are not members of the CBC must be there as well. Like the other lists, there will be a fee associated with including nonmember books on the Bookshelf. A nominal fee of $100 per year will allow a non CBC member publishing house to submit as many books as they please to the CBC Diversity Bookshelf.
There are some things CBC Diversity cannot control when it comes to Goodreads.
If you are a non CBC member publisher and interested in adding your books to the CBC Diversity Goodreads Bookshelf, please contact Ayanna Coleman at ayanna.coleman@cbcbooks.org for more information.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Executive Editor at Penguin Random House
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.)
So how did I get that dream job? First I was lucky enough to get an internship in the children’s department at Little, Brown while still in college. (Alvina, thanks for interviewing me!) The talented group there was so excited and passionate about all books for kids – not just the ones they were publishing. They introduced me to Toot and Puddle, Speak, Harry Potter, and Holes, and that sealed it for me.
