CBC Diversity
Month
1) Why do you think there’s such a dearth of diverse children’s books?
In a couple of words: white supremacy. The fact that there are more books published about animals than about black kids says a lot, not only about our society, but about “Western” sensibilities and colonization on the whole. About the perception of “race” and the role of literacy in the development of societal hierarchies. The English staked their claim on land in various places around the world and forced the people in those places to learn the English language, but literature and the arts were reserved for members of the highest social classes. Who were all white.
The fact that we’re almost two decades into the 21st Century and just now beginning to see books written in English that reflect the realities of the English-speaking world says a lot about who, historically, has been expected—or even allowed—to achieve English literacy. When all the business-related rhetoric is stripped away (“Those types of books statistically don’t sell well.” “The numbers don’t suggest that this would be a good investment.”), the implications are that 1) certain groups of people don’t read and 2) the people who do read wouldn’t want to read about x-type of people. The marginalized wind up doubting the validity of their very existence, and the privileged continue to see themselves as the protagonists of the only stories that matter. I’m sure I don’t have to explain why this is detrimental to everyone.
By Amy Rose Capetta
I discovered the joys of theater in middle school for a sad but simple reason: I was quitting dance. At the age of twelve, I was told by my teacher that I couldn’t continue at an advanced level without losing a significant amount of weight. The issue of body policing in the performing arts comes up in my YA novel Echo After Echo, specifically for the main character, Zara, who is not the waifish ingénue people have come to expect. Fortunately, when I chose to leave dance behind, I fell into theater, and despite being a different body type than many of my fellow actresses, I found roles and fell in love with acting.
My new life of green rooms and backstage bonding brought my first queer friends. It’s no real secret that the theater world, from the professional stages in NYC to the drama clubs in most schools are havens for creative and hardworking LGBTQIAP folks. Before I even knew I was queer, I found my people, and they shared my fervor for story-making, a heady mix of love and ambition that still drives me. We collected, we rehearsed, we constructed sets with questionable structural integrity, we held our hearts outside of our bodies night after night, we threw AMAZING cast parties.
1. Tell us about your most recent book and how you came to write/illustrate it.
WILD BEAUTY is about queer Latina girls and enchanted, murderous gardens. The Nomeolvides women, including the youngest generation of five cousins, tend the grounds of La Pradera, a famously beautiful garden known both for enthralling visitors and killing those who break its rules. This story grew from my love of flowers and from wanting to write girls like me and my cousins into the world of fairy tales.
2. Do you think of yourself as a diverse author/illustrator?
I’m queer, Latina, and I’m married to a trans guy, so in a way I didn’t set out to write diverse fiction any more than I set out to live a diverse life. Writing inclusive stories was a matter of letting the truth I already know have a place in my work.
weneeddiversebooks:
A Diwali storytime guide from Kitaab World.
Check out our Q&A with Nikki Grimes, author of THE WATCHER ( Eerdman’s Books for Young Readers, October 2017)!
1. What inspired you to write The Watcher?
A few years ago, I was invited to write a Golden Shovel poem for The Golden Shovel Anthology, a collection honoring the work of Pulitzer Prize-winning Poet, Gwendolyn Brooks. This new poetry form, created by Terence Hayes specifically for this anthology, was brand new, and so this was my first introduction to it. I fell immediately in love with the form and could not wait to use it again, for a project of my own. One of the first two ideas that came to me was to apply the form to the exploration of a Psalm. It seemed perfect. The Psalms are poetry, after all, and the Golden Shovel is all about borrowing lines from existing poems to create new ones. The question, of course, was which Psalm. I had a picture book in mind, and in order for this treatment to work for a picture book, the Psalm had to be relatively short, and so I searched for just the right one. Psalm 121 is one of my favorite passages of scripture, and the length seemed exactly right.
