CBC Diversity

Contributed by Nikki Garcia, assistant editor, Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

Six months ago, I wrote a post for the CBC Diversity blog discussing socioeconomic diversity and my personal struggles with financial security as a child. I wish there were more children’s books when I was growing up that didn’t make me feel different. So for this post, I want to name some books that are showing young readers a different economic view—a view through a different but important lens. Because you just never know who is struggling to make ends meet.

Here is my book wish list for my younger self:

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Contributed by Donna Bray, Vice President, Co-Publisher of Balzer + Bray, HarperCollins Publishers

“How many people with disabilities work here?”

This was one of the first questions young author Aaron Philip asked our staff when he and his family arrived at the HarperCollins offices to meet us. We all looked around uncomfortably, because the answer is that we work with few to no disabled employees. Aaron went on to speak passionately about the invisibility he and other people with cerebral palsy – and many wheelchair users – often feel when they rarely see themselves represented in the workplace, in television and films, in books, in the news. Aaron is ambitious – he wants a life and a career in the world. But where are his models? This discussion inspired and has stayed with me, and has made me especially glad to be able to contribute to bringing visibility to disability with the publication of This Kid Can Fly.

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Contributed by Ashley Woodfolk, Marketing Manager, Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group

Weeks ago, when I signed up for a guest post in June, I had planned it to be a celebration of Pride month. I had planned to do a round-up of all my favorite YA novels that feature LGBTIA plus characters, like Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, I’ll Give You the Sun, Carry On, and Ask the Passengers. But I can’t write light-heartedly about how I love Simon Vs. The Homosapien Agenda almost as much as I love Oreos, or how Boy Meets Boy was the first book that made me really think about the things I’d been raised to believe, because 49 people senselessly died this month just because of where they were and who they love, and writing about books feels embarrassingly insignificant, if not completely impossible.

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Contributed by Alyssa Mito Pusey, Senior Editor, Charlesbridge

“Every single day,” Michelle Obama told the graduating class at the City College in New York, “I wake up in a house that was built by slaves.”

She’s right; the White House was built in large part by slaves, along with freed black men and immigrants from Scotland and Ireland. So why did I edit a book called The House That George Built? As Allie Jane Bruce points out in a recent blog post on Reading While White, the book privileges white perspective and glosses over the contributions of slaves.

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Contributed by Faye Bi, Senior Publicist,  Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing

This year marks the 50^th anniversary of the Cultural Revolution in China, which historians agree took place 1966-1976. Many Western media outlets were quick to provide retrospectives (see: The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Guardian, CNN, and The Atlantic), but up until recently, it represented a huge gap in my historical knowledge, despite being born to two Chinese immigrant parents. This colossal historical event that caused nearly 2-30 million deaths (depending on whom you ask) was barely touched on in my formal education; China was nowhere near its current economic prowess when I was a kid, not important enough to be put under the international spotlight until now.

My parents, who arrived in Canada in 1989 with an infant-me in tow, were tight-lipped about their life in China beforehand. They were born in 1960, young children who came of age during the Cultural Revolution under conditions of which I was blissfully unaware. There were clues, of course—we lived a frugal life on my father’s Ph.D. stipend, and I was taught from an early age not to waste food. Education was highly prized, and my wardrobe was a steady rotation of homemade clothes, knits, and hand-me-downs. And then there were offhand comments, like, “I would have had to work in the countryside if I hadn’t moved to Canada” from my father, or “My parents sent me away as a baby to live with my grandmother” from my mother. I knew my mother had worked in a shoe factory, on her feet for 12 hours a day, which meant our early weekends selling spring rolls at the flea market for extra cash were pittance.

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