Diversity
Creating a blockbuster with diverse characters requires years of commitment, collaboration, and buy-in from every segment of the publishing community.
The $700 million spent by librarians annually is not just a drop in the bucket, and our collective spending power can be used to move the needle in the publishing landscape toward diverse authors, characters, and books. So what are we waiting for?
What does your neighborhood really need from you? Tips to help libraries get to know the communities that they serve, with a resource list of potential partners, literacy and early childhood organizations, and sources of demographic data.
To add diversity to your collection, or build one that considers your community's demographics, consider these titles that you may have missed, including Coe Booth's middle-grade debut and a memoir by an undocumented immigrant.
Cammie McGovern aims to fill a gap in young adult literature with Say What You Will—featuring complicated, fleshed out characters with disabilities who live, fall in love, and make mistakes just like anyone else. She talks with SLJ about her inspiration for the novel, diversity in YA lit, and what she’s working on next.
Over 300 people attended the #WeNeedDiverseBooks panel on May 31 held at New York City’s Jacob Javits Center as part of BookExpo America’s consumer-focused BookCon event; the session was added late to the program after the grassroot campaign’s hashtag went viral following its launch, eliciting more than 162 million tweets since May 1.
SLJ attends this year's BookExpo America (May 28-30) at the Javits Convention Center in New York City and took the opportunity to catch up with award-winning authors, like A Plague of Unicorns (Zonderkids, 2014) Jane Yolen, and even famous actors like "How I Met Your Mother's" Jason Segel whose children's book Nightmares!M/em> comes out in September through Delacorte.
On May 13, First Book, a nonprofit committed to providing books to children in need, called for U.S. publishers to publish diverse picture books and then pledged to buy 10,000 copies of each title selected by First Book. The nonprofit will also fund affordable paperback editions of diverse titles that are only publicly available in expensive hardcover formats.
Authors address the topic of the day in this 12-minute clip from the "Diversity in Middle Grade Fiction" panel at School Library Journal's Day of Dialog, held in New York on May 28, 2014.
1,402 articles
ALREADY A SUBSCRIBER? LOG IN
We are currently offering this content for free. Sign up now to activate your personal profile, where you can save articles for future viewing
ALREADY A SUBSCRIBER? LOG IN
Thank you for visiting.
We’ve noticed you are using a private browser. To continue, please log in or create an account.
