I’ve been talking a lot about Guadalupe Garcia McCall’s new book, Summer of the Mariposas, which we’ll be publishing at Tu this fall. Another thing coming out this fall that we’ll have more info about in the coming weeks is an amazing anthology edited by Tobias Buckell and Joe Monti featuring a list of authors that will knock your socks off. More on that in the coming weeks when the official announcement comes out.
And if you’re a Tankborn fan, you’ll be happy to know that coming Spring 2013 is the second book of what is now a Tankborn trilogy! A lot of the questions that remained open in book 1 will be explored in further depth. Will Kayla and Devak be able to overcome their huge gap in status? Will the GENs be able to take ownership of their own resistance movement? What secrets are lurking in this world that Kayla hasn’t even known to discover yet? It’s gonna be awesome.
Coming that same season is a new book we just acquired that I’m so excited about: New Worlds by Shana Mlawski stars Balthazar Infante, a bookmaker’s apprentice who, accompanied by a half-genie, sets off on Columbus’s journey to the New World to avoid the Spanish Inquisition and fulfill a quest to find his father and figure out his magical heritage. A look at this time period of history from the point of view of those who the Spanish Inquisition targeted, Jewish and Moorish people, and then jumping across the pond to look at Columbus’s journey in a new light. I never even realized that the two happened at the same time! More on that as the editorial process goes forward.
And if you’re a reviewer, blogger, reviewer/blogger, blogger/reviewer . . . well, if you’re on Netgalley, you know what I mean when I say that Cat Girl’s Day Off and Vodnik are also now up in the catalog. If you’re on NetGalley, you’ll know where to look.
Join award-winning authors Donna Jo Napoli and Mitali Perkins, as well as editors Alvina Ling and Stacy Whitman, and special guest Kathryn Erskine for an intensive four-day workshop. Your mentors will work with you to discover your true cultural voice through impeccable research, imagination, empathy, and experience. Our goal is to gather a community of open-minded children’s book authors who wish to think deeply about questions such as:
Who has the right to write multiculturally?
How do we bring humility to our research?
What audience are we writing for?
If you are interested in being a part of this amazing opportunity, please fill out the application and submit it, with your responses to the essay questions, in addition to your writing sample. Applications for our scholarships are available by e-mailing Jo Lloyd at jo.lloyd@highlightsfoundation.org, or calling, toll-free, (877) 512-8365.
Just wanted to let everyone know: if you’re waiting on me to email you a handout, can you remind me in about a week or two? My home laptop has finally given up the ghost, so I’m without a computer at home for at least the next week or two, and that’s where the last version of the handout lives (backed up on the external hard drive, thankfully). I’m also moving this weekend, so in general it’s kind of nuts right now, but once the computer is back I’ll be glad to share it with you. In the meantime, feel free to browse the “diversity” tag on this site, which will give you many of the same resources, or check out the SCBWI roundup link from a few posts back, in which I linked to the book I discussed on Deep Culture.
Creative commons courtesy amboowho? on Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/amboo213/
Remember how I told you that I’d acquired Guadalupe Garcia McCall’s Six Little Sisters? In case you’re waiting with bated breath, it will now and forevermore be called Summer of the Mariposas. It’s a gorgeous title, and I think it’s even better than Seis Hermanitas (which is Six Little Sisters in Spanish) because of the imagery of butterflies that is so prominent in the book. Just got a revision in, which I’m looking forward to reading. Just thought I’d tease you with that, and tell you that you’ll be able to read it yourself this fall.
And while you’re waiting, go read Guadalupe’s debut novel in verse, Under the Mesquite, which just won the Pura Belpre author award and is being put on best-of lists left and right, and congratulate her! I didn’t edit that one, so send congratulatory thoughts to my colleague Emily for a job well done.
I had such a great time talking to everyone at SCBWI Winter Conference this weekend and teaching the multicultural books breakout. In one of my sessions, we didn’t get to this part of my notes, and for the others, we had to go through the list quickly because it was so long.
One thing we talked about is how the industry itself is working on awareness and furthering diversity among the books themselves and future publishing personnel. Last night, we launched the CBC Diversity Committee, which is working on these goals with other publishing partners. We have a brand-new website (which will gain content as time goes on) and plan a variety of events such as panels discussing diversity, visiting school career days and job fairs, and just continuing the conversation about diversity in all platforms, such as social media. See also some press coverage, where Robin Adelsen, the CBC’s executive director, shares our goals:
To make a difference, we will focus on recruitment by visiting high schools and colleges, providing resources on the CBC Diversity blog and promoting discourse by hosting panel and roundtable discussions.
I also promised attendees of my session that I would share with them the list of questions we discussed that might help us to know what questions to ask when thinking about deep cultural differences, whether we’re talking about writing cross-culturally in the sense of writing from a perspective not our own, or whether we’re thinking about reaching a readership that isn’t entirely our own culture, and if perhaps there might be some ways to express/acknowledge those differences in our writing. In the case of writing from our own cultural perspective, these questions may be less useful, but nonetheless I think they might get us all thinking about how culture affects decisions we make—not as a form of conditioning, at least no more than any other culture, but as a framework by which we interpret the world. Thinking about these questions may help us in our writing as we apply them to characterization, worldbuilding, plot (how a character reacts to certain problems may certainly be affected by cultural attitudes, whether he or she goes with mainstream culture or not, as does how other characters interact with that person, which eventually over the course of a book turns into a sequence of actions that turn into plot), setting, and so forth.
These questions are from chapter 9 of the excellent book A Beginner’s Guide to the Deep Culture Experience: Beneath the Surfaceby Joseph Shaules. The author was writing to an audience of potential U.S. expats living abroad, with the idea of helping them to think about cultural differences and ways to adapt to their new countries and enjoy the journey, but as I read it, I found so much that is applicable to ways we might think of culture in terms of writing about it, not to mention the adaptation experiences I had living with college roommates from other countries The intercultural experience goes both ways—though I didn’t live in another country, and so my experience wasn’t quite as deep, I still found I had to adapt and learn from my roommates if I wanted to get along with them.
I highly recommend reading the whole book, or at least chapter 9, where he expands on these questions and discusses how the answers are not either-or, good/bad—just choices that don’t have a value attached to them that show how different people choose to handle universal human questions in different ways.
Whom are people loyal to?
Who gets respect?
How do we ensure fairness and efficiency?
How do we manage our emotions?
Who is in control?
What time is it?
How can we judge goodness and truth?
How different are men and women?
Am I in your space?
Shall we look forward or back?
Also: I loved that there were several Koreans in my seminar over the course of the day, two in one session alone! After that session, we got to talking about why and how I’m learning Korean, so I wanted to give a shout-out to the excellent Talk to Me in Korean and their sister site, HaruKorean. I think for those with middle-school aged kids and older, and for us adults looking to learn, it’s a great place to learn Korean both by ear (with the short podcasts that feel like you’re just listening to your Korean friends bantering, yet you’re learning at the same time) and in writing (at HaruKorean you can practice Korean sentences and get corrections from native Korean speakers).
And lastly (but not least), one thing I didn’t get to include in my presentation for lack of time was bookseller Elizabeth Bluemle’s anecdote about how she talks up diversity to her customers, which illustrates well the bookseller-reader part of the diversity in publishing equation. She noted,
“Thinking about our own approach to race in children’s books requires ongoing self-assessment for all of us booksellers, me included. For instance: when I handsell books to customers, I usually gather three to five possible titles and booktalk each one.”
She said that in that stack, she tries to include at least one book featuring a character of color, and if she sees resistance on a customer’s face about the book about the character of color,
“…and they say those coded things like, ‘I don’t think that’s really for him,’ or ‘Oh, she wouldn’t like that,’ you can say, ‘Kids in town LOVE this book!’ (Of course, that has to actually be true. You never compromise your integrity or reputation by pretending a book is good or popular when it isn’t.) And you can make one more gentle try, by saying why you chose that book for that customer’s grandchild…”
…focusing on what’s great about the story—the adventure, the specifics of the plot.
“If they still say no, at least they will be more aware of why they’re saying no.”
Given that today is Martin Luther King Day, and that we’re still dealing with book banning based on race even today, I’d like to make a booklist in honor of those books banned in Arizona. Let’s crowd-source. This can be a pretty wide list, and some of the books might be a little radical, if by “radical” we mean considering that Columbus might not have had the best of intentions when it came to indigenous peoples in the Caribbean and on the American continents, but I think that books like this are important to the discourse in this country, especially in places like Arizona where they’re dealing with the confluence of several cultures with conflicting goals. After all, couldn’t that apply in so many places in this world? How will we come to understand one another’s points of view if we ban those viewpoints? From the Salon.com article:
Another notable text removed from Tucson’s classrooms is Shakespeare’s play “The Tempest.” In a meeting this week, administrators informed Mexican-American studies teachers to stay away from any units where “race, ethnicity and oppression are central themes,” including the teaching of Shakespeare’s classic in Mexican-American literature courses.
Here’s the list of books banned in the Tucson school district last week (source). What other books like this should we celebrate?
*For more on the situation in Arizona, see here and here.
BANNED MEXICAN AMERICAN STUDIES READING LIST Curriculum Audit of the Mexican American Studies Department, Tucson Unified School District, May 2, 2011.
High School Course Texts and Reading Lists Table 20: American Government/Social Justice Education Project 1, 2 – Texts and Reading Lists
Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years (1998), by B. Bigelow and B. Peterson
The Latino Condition: A Critical Reader (1998), by R. Delgado and J. Stefancic
Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (2001), by R. Delgado and J. Stefancic
Pedagogy of the Oppressed (2000), by P. Freire
United States Government: Democracy in Action (2007), by R. C. Remy
Dictionary of Latino Civil Rights History (2006), by F. A. Rosales
Declarations of Independence: Cross-Examining American Ideology (1990), by H. Zinn
Table 21: American History/Mexican American Perspectives, 1, 2 – Texts and Reading Lists
Occupied America: A History of Chicanos (2004), by R. Acuna
The Anaya Reader (1995), by R. Anaya
The American Vision (2008), by J. Appleby et el.
Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years (1998), by B. Bigelow and B. Peterson
Drink Cultura: Chicanismo (1992), by J. A. Burciaga
Message to Aztlan: Selected Writings (1997), by C. Jiminez
De Colores Means All of Us: Latina Views Multi-Colored Century (1998), by E. S. Martinez
500 Anos Del Pueblo Chicano/500 Years of Chicano History in Pictures (1990), by E. S. Martinez
Codex Tamuanchan: On Becoming Human (1998), by R. Rodriguez
The X in La Raza II (1996), by R. Rodriguez
Dictionary of Latino Civil Rights History (2006), by F. A. Rosales
A People’s History of the United States: 1492 to Present (2003), by H. Zinn
Course: English/Latino Literature 7, 8
Ten Little Indians (2004), by S. Alexie
The Fire Next Time (1990), by J. Baldwin
Loverboys (2008), by A. Castillo
Women Hollering Creek (1992), by S. Cisneros
Mexican WhiteBoy (2008), by M. de la Pena
Drown (1997), by J. Diaz
Woodcuts of Women (2000), by D. Gilb
At the Afro-Asian Conference in Algeria (1965), by E. Guevara
Color Lines: “Does Anti-War Have to Be Anti-Racist Too?” (2003), by E. Martinez
Culture Clash: Life, Death and Revolutionary Comedy (1998), by R. Montoya et al.
Let Their Spirits Dance (2003) by S. Pope Duarte
Two Badges: The Lives of Mona Ruiz (1997), by M. Ruiz
The Tempest (1994), by W. Shakespeare
A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (1993), by R. Takaki
The Devil’s Highway (2004), by L. A. Urrea
Puro Teatro: A Latino Anthology (1999), by A. Sandoval-Sanchez & N. Saporta Sternbach
Twelve Impossible Things before Breakfast: Stories (1997), by J. Yolen
Voices of a People’s History of the United States (2004), by H. Zinn
Course: English/Latino Literature 5, 6
Live from Death Row (1996), by J. Abu-Jamal
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight in Heaven (1994), by S. Alexie
Zorro (2005), by I. Allende
Borderlands La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1999), by G. Anzaldua
A Place to Stand (2002), by J. S. Baca
C-Train and Thirteen Mexicans (2002), by J. S. Baca
Healing Earthquakes: Poems (2001), by J. S. Baca
Immigrants in Our Own Land and Selected Early Poems (1990), by J. S. Baca
Black Mesa Poems (1989), by J. S. Baca
Martin & Mediations on the South Valley (1987), by J. S. Baca
The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on America’s Public Schools (19950, by D. C. Berliner and B. J. Biddle
Drink Cultura: Chicanismo (1992), by J. A Burciaga
Red Hot Salsa: Bilingual Poems on Being Young and Latino in the United States (2005), by L. Carlson & O. Hijuielos
Cool Salsa: Bilingual Poems on Growing up Latino in the United States (1995), by L. Carlson & O. Hijuielos
So Far From God (1993), by A. Castillo
Address to the Commonwealth Club of California (1985), by C. E. Chavez
Women Hollering Creek (1992), by S. Cisneros
House on Mango Street (1991), by S. Cisneros
Drown (1997), by J. Diaz
Suffer Smoke (2001), by E. Diaz Bjorkquist
Zapata’s Discipline: Essays (1998), by M. Espada
Like Water for Chocolate (1995), by L. Esquievel
When Living was a Labor Camp (2000), by D. Garcia
La Llorona: Our Lady of Deformities (2000), by R. Garcia
Cantos Al Sexto Sol: An Anthology of Aztlanahuac Writing (2003), by C. Garcia-Camarilo, et al.
The Magic of Blood (1994), by D. Gilb
Message to Aztlan: Selected Writings (2001), by Rudolfo “Corky” Gonzales
Saving Our Schools: The Case for Public Education, Saying No to “No Child Left Behind” (2004) by Goodman, et al.
Feminism if for Everybody (2000), by b hooks
The Circuit: Stories from the Life of a Migrant Child (1999), by F. Jimenez
Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools (1991), by J. Kozol
Zigzagger (2003), by M. Munoz
Infinite Divisions: An Anthology of Chicana Literature (1993), by T. D. Rebolledo & E. S. Rivero
…y no se lo trago la tierra/And the Earth Did Not Devour Him (1995), by T. Rivera
Always Running – La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A. (2005), by L. Rodriguez
Justice: A Question of Race (1997), by R. Rodriguez
The X in La Raza II (1996), by R. Rodriguez
Crisis in American Institutions (2006), by S. H. Skolnick & E. Currie
Los Tucsonenses: The Mexican Community in Tucson, 1854-1941 (1986), by T. Sheridan
Curandera (1993), by Carmen Tafolla
Mexican American Literature (1990), by C. M. Tatum
New Chicana/Chicano Writing (1993), by C. M. Tatum
Civil Disobedience (1993), by H. D. Thoreau
By the Lake of Sleeping Children (1996), by L. A. Urrea
Nobody’s Son: Notes from an American Life (2002), by L. A. Urrea
Zoot Suit and Other Plays (1992), by L. Valdez
Ocean Power: Poems from the Desert (1995), by O. Zepeda
ETA: Also appropriate to this discussion, OTHER things that MLK once said besides the quotes you normally hear on this day:
One thing we talked about is how the industry itself is working on awareness and furthering diversity among the books themselves and future publishing personnel. Last night, we launched the 
These questions are from chapter 9 of the excellent book 
Also: I loved that there were several Koreans in my seminar over the course of the day, two in one session alone! After that session, we got to talking about why and how I’m learning Korean, so I wanted to give a shout-out to the excellent 