 Ah, good morning. Hey. Hey, you know, that wasn't bad. I thought, this is a room of mostly white people. And I'm going to say, let's do some call and response, which is part of the Black vernacular tradition. But apparently, you're already hip to that. I have to say that when I'm on the West Coast, things are so different. And it was not until 2014 that I actually made it to California, which is kind of embarrassing. But it was because my good friend, Laura Atkins, invited me. And I met all of these amazing Bay Area librarians, including Nina Lindsay, and Amy Martin, and more people than I can name right now. But when Meredith gave us such a lovely introduction and said it was a dream come true to have me and to have Debbie here in conversation, I just want you to know, Meredith, that you probably already do know this, I don't get invited to a whole lot of places. And you might find out why when I start my presentation. But I think Debbie also understands that when you have what is considered a radical point of view, your audience can become very, very narrow and small. So I very much appreciate that you put me on a stage in front of a microphone, and then you're going to let me and Debbie talk at the same time. That could be dangerous. But like you said, we're here to do it for the kids. So what I'm going to do with my presentation is I'm going to read a little bit of an essay that I published in School Library Journal on self-publishing and black authors, and then I'm going to switch over and just kind of freestyle with my PowerPoint presentation. I can't breathe. I'm a black feminist writer committed to social justice. I write stories about black children and teens, but within the children's literature community, I have struggled to find a home. I am and likely will remain an outsider. By industry standards, I suppose, I'm a failed author. Since I started writing for Young Readers in 2000, only three of my 30 stories have been traditionally published. I turned to self-publishing as my only recourse and now face the contempt of those who see self-publishing as a mere exercise in vanity. Last year, a white Facebook friend suggested that my decision to self-publish was analogous to blacks in the civil rights era, choosing to dine in their segregated neighborhood instead of integrating Jim Crow lunch counters in the South. In her mind, self-publishing is a cowardly form of surrender to be truly noble and therefore deserving of publication. I ought to patiently insist upon my right to sit alongside white authors, regardless of the hostility, rejection, and disdain I regularly encounter. Since 2009, I've used my scholarly training to examine white supremacy in the children's literature community, where African-Americans remain marginalized despite the 2014 increase in books about blacks. This sudden spike reflected in the latest statistics from the Cooperative Children's Book Center was not paired with a comparable increase in the number of books by blacks. However, suggesting that power remains where it has always been in the hands of whites. Publishers Weekly's 2014 salary survey revealed that only 1% of industry professionals self-identify as African-American. 89% self-identify as white. That the homogeneity of the publishing workforce matches the homogeneity of published authors in their books is no coincidence. The marginalization of writers of color is the result of very deliberate decisions made by gatekeepers within the children's literature community, editors, agents, librarians, and reviewers. I know better than to turn to the publishing industry when I seek justice for my children, Trayvon, Reynisha, Jordan, Ilan, Ramali, Ayanna, and Tamir. But I also know that children's literature can help to counter the racially biased thinking that insists Michael Brown was, quote, no angel, but rather, quote, a demon to be feared and destroyed. I believe there's a direct link between the misrepresentation of black youth as inherently criminal and the justification given by those who so brazenly take their lives. This erasure of black youth from children's literature functions as a kind of symbolic annihilation. Despite the fact that the majority of primary school aged children in the US are now children of color, the publishing industry continues to produce books that overwhelmingly feature white children only. The message is clear. The lives of black children don't matter. OK, so now I'm going to step over here. So I'm going to start with a very brief definition of an indie author, as a writer who's decided to independently publish her work without the help of an agent or an editor employed at a traditional publishing house. And I should say that I just recently signed with an agent from the Andrea Brown agency. And I'm not doing cartwheels yet, because having one white woman agent enthusiastic about my stories does not ensure that she's going to be able to find a white woman editor who's also enthusiastic about my stories. Many indie authors use offset printing or print-on-demand technology to produce their books. And it's important to remember that indie authors often come from marginalized groups that lack access to the traditional publishing system. It's not just about, I want to see my name on a book. It's OK to laugh at any of the pictures of me that come up was not as cute as Debbie, the babies in Debbie's family, but it was the 70s. OK, so and my mother cut my hair, my white mother. So the picture on the left hand side is me when I was in preschool. And I have been a storyteller even before I knew how to write because my report cards indicate that the teacher was trying to tell my mother to tell me to stop talking to other kids and telling them stories while the teacher is speaking. So I think I learned early on that to be a storyteller, a determined storyteller, is also to be a troublemaker. And the picture on the right hand side, you can barely see her, but my older sister is trying to hold me on her lap. And read me a book. And people think that because both my parents are school teachers, I must have grown up in a house full of books. But that's actually one of the only brand new books we ever had, because my mother would bring home some raggedy books from school that the librarian was going to throw out. But I really owe a debt to my mother because she made sure that my brother, sister, and I each had a library card. And it was a weekly habit to go up to the library, get a stack of books, come home when I read my books. I tried to read my sister's books. I tried to read my brother's books. I read his Spider-Man comic books. I read just about everything I could get my hands on. And in my family, there is no habit of buying books. And I mean to this day. So I have 22 books for kids. I don't think my mother has ever bought one. She's one of nine children. And they buy one book and then pass it amongst themselves to this day and then talk about it that way. So I was really fortunate to have good libraries when I was growing up in Canada. Canada has a lot of rhetoric around multiculturalism. But actually, as unfortunate as the statistics are here on diverse literature, there are worse in Canada. Fortunately, my mother was my kindergarten teacher. She loved Ezra Jack Keats. And so I had his books. And this is a picture to me of diversity. I grew up outside of Toronto in a community that was majority white. I was usually the only black girl in my class. But when I read a book by Ezra Jack Keats, and this book was published the year I was born, I could see kids that look like me. Because there's a girl with a poncho and a girl with an afro, and I had a poncho and I had an afro. And I have to say, I had really good self-esteem as a child because I thought I was very cute. And I was almost always wearing secondhand clothes from someone else that donated to us. But this essay by a scholar, Rudine Sims Bishop, is important. I'm sure it's familiar to everyone. She talks about mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors. And says, readers often seek their mirrors in books. And of course, you know that a book that's a mirror shows you your reflection. And a book that's a window lets you look into someone else's world. And then the sliding glass door bit gets left out quite often. But we don't want kids to stop and be a voyeur and just look at other people as if there's some kind of spectacle. The idea is if the sliding glass door opens, then the divide between the reader and the characters disappears. And you can engage with them in a really meaningful way. Now, Rudine Sims Bishop also talks about the impact of not having mirror books when you're a child. So if you never see yourself reflected in the pages of a book, you can experience diminished self-esteem. Your reality is not validated. You can experience the diminished interest in reading. And on the flip side, if you're a child who sees yourself over and over and over again in the pages of a book, you can develop a distorted sense of self-importance. You might start to think you're the center of the universe because you're always saving the universe and no one else ever is. And this is what's really key is to remember that inclusive books don't just benefit the children that have been excluded. It's really important if you're raising a child in a global society and you want them to be able to engage with people who are different. I can't tell you the number of times I've had a librarian take me aside and say, oh, Zeta, I love your books. And I would have them at my school, but we don't have any black children. Because in her mind, books that have a black child on the cover and the pages are only for black children. And I always say that's exactly why you need my books. Books are not a substitute for lived experience, but they can help at least introduce children to those who are different. So these are the books I grew up reading. The Secret Garden, the Lion, the Witch, and the Roard, the Roard, the Phoenix, and the Carpet, which is a consequence of growing up in a country that is a former British colony. I loved those books. I won't lie. I still have a lot of affection for those books, but when I read them again in the past, say, five years, I was horrified by how racist and sexist and imperialist and elitist they are. And part of me really hopes they're not being taught in schools anymore, although I'm sure they are. The consequence of reading so many books that were not a mirror is that when I started writing, took creative writing class my senior year of high school, I was asked to write an adventure story. And I wrote about a little girl who grabs hold of a kite and gets swept across the city. And you can see she doesn't look like me. And her family does not look like mine. And it took me quite a while to decolonize my imagination. And I wrote an essay for Horm Book by that same title. And it's an ongoing process. It's taken a very long time for me to realize that people that look like me and families that look like mine are worthy of being in a book. So I hope we can talk a little bit later about the myth of meritocracy. So when my first picture book was published in 2008 by Leigh-Anne Lowe Books, Shaja Strickland and I won a number of awards and honors. And I thought for sure that publishers were going to be knocking down my door, because I had 20 other manuscripts. And I kept making it clear that I had 20 other manuscripts. But even Leigh-Anne Lowe was not interested. And so I started to do some research. I am thankful for my scholarly training. And of course, came across the statistics kept annually by the CCBC. And this is from 2012. But that visual illustration has such a strong impact, especially on children who inherently know when something is unfair. And I like that Tina Coogler, the expression she put on the white child's face. Because it's not like she's smug and lording it over them. She's embarrassed and uncomfortable and probably ashamed, even though it's not her fault. So we noticed that in 2014, according to Leigh-Anne Lowe, there was an uptick in the number of books about people of color. And I always want to make it clear that when we talk about books about people of color, the numbers are higher than if we were talking about books by people of color and First Nations authors as well. So we see here that there was an uptick in 2014, even though the numbers have been relatively flat for such a long time. But it's important to take a closer look at the CCBC statistics, because they show us here books by, but not about. So even if African-Americans produced, say, 50 books at this point, look at the number of books about African and African-Americans. And then I'd ask you to take a closer look at the numbers for the Asian Pacific American group, which is extremely troubling to me. So Asian Pacific Americans represent the largest quote unquote minority group being published, but they are not writing about Asian Americans. So the message is, if you're a person of color and you want to get published, write white. And here again at those statistics, 261 books had significant African or African-American content. Only 86 were by Black authors. And those are the Asian-American statistics at the bottom as well. 130 of the books they wrote had no visible APA content. So Lee and Lowe did another diversity baseline, or did their first diversity baseline survey, which showed us that overall, the publishing industry, and that's editors, sales and marketing, reviewers, overwhelming these straight white cisgender women who don't live with disabilities. And I hope we can have a conversation, Debbie, about how to address dominance. And it is very difficult when you are accustomed to seeing yourself as a victim or as someone who is oppressed to then see yourself as someone who might be oppressing others. And one of the ways that white privilege works so insidiously is that it makes white people think that they're individuals and that they don't operate as a group. But when you are the overwhelming majority of educators, librarians, editors, reviewers, and then we have such extreme racial disparities, somebody has to be held accountable. And how do we talk about accountability without alienating potential allies? So what I hear very often is people say, well, publishing is hard for everybody. However, there's an excellent book by John Young called Black Writers, White Publishers. And he says, quote, what sets the white publisher Black Author relationship apart is the underlying social structure that transforms the usual unequal relationship into an extension of a much deeper cultural dynamic. The predominantly white publishing industry reflects and often reinforces the racial divide that has always defined American society. We already have quite a few M words in the title of our talk, but I would also love it if we could talk about masculinity. Because I think if I was a black man, I'd have a 10-book deal. I think there's a difficult history between black women and white women. I hope we can talk about that. So in 2014, I self-published nine books, 2015, five more books, 2016. So far, I've self-published three books, and I probably have a couple more coming out this summer. I am an advocate for organic writing. Organic writing reflects the values, cultural practices, and histories of a particular community. It originates within a particular community. This is key. For those of you who don't know, there are book packages who develop a concept and then go look for a writer to write the book according to their specifications. And what I see happening now with some of the writers I know is that book packages have a group of white editors in a room who come up with a concept and then go find a black writer to write that book. And then that black writer goes out into the world, their face is next to the book, and that book could end up on the New York Times bestseller list. But you should check the copyright, because the copyright does not belong to that author. The copyright belongs to the packager. So everything, everything is an example of one of those books. That's a book packaged by Alloy that ended up on the New York Times bestseller list. And I interviewed a couple of women of color who work for book packages and said, should that book be eligible for a Coretta Scott King Award? And one said, absolutely. And the other said it should be split between the author and the packager. That's not organic, in my opinion. Organic writing embraces the idea of universal stories but recognizes that culturally specific narratives can affirm the realities of marginalized and underrepresented children. Community-based publishing uses small independent presses or print-on-demand technology to produce books that reflects those values and cultural practices, operates without outsider approval or interference, and lastly prioritizes the welfare of community members over commercial success. The last time I was here, a woman came up to Janine Macbeth, who's a fantastic independent publisher, and said to her, I work with high school students from Samoa, and we are desperate for books for my community. And I'm doing a breakout session after this to talk about community-based publishing, because if she were to wait on the publishing industry to come up with books for Samoa, I mean, you'd be waiting forever, because it's not commercially viable. And people say this over and over and over again. The adversity has to sell. No, it doesn't. It has value in and of itself. Inclusiveness has value in and of itself. Don't, please don't fit it inside a capitalist model. So I self-published my young adult time travel novel, The Wish After Midnight, 2008. I don't know why I picked Pepto-Bismol Pink as the color, but I did. Amazon started its own publishing company and contacted me in 2009 and said, we're just gonna put a new cover on the book and release it, and they did. But it was not reviewed anywhere. 2012, they also did Ship of Souls. 2013, they did not want the deep, or they were gonna make me wait for a couple of years, so I self-published that myself. These are historical fantasy books for young adults. I use print-on-demand options like Create Space, Lulu Upwork, you can also use Lightning Source. I realized that in the books that I self-published, I was talking back to some of the problematic books I had read but loved as a child, like The Boy in the Bubble. The Phoenix on Barkley Street, Ian Nesbitt's The Phoenix in the Carpet made such an impression on me, and that book is so horrifically racist and imperialist. So my kids in an urban neighborhood find a Phoenix in their backyard and then go to the Berkeley Museum, the ancient Egyptian section, and find a piece of papyrus with the bird painted on it, and that's how I made it a more hybrid, Afro-urban text for myself. You may not know, but Beatrix Potter had to self-publish. She couldn't get her books out into the world initially. I love that self-publishing allows me to address things in a topical and timely way. I wrote this story right after 9-11 and didn't publish it until 2014 because I kept thinking some publisher would snap it up and they didn't, but addressing Islamophobia is something that's really important to me, and I don't know if you can see the little girl in her job standing under the flag there. And my book, I Love Snow, was a tribute to Ezra Jackheats's Snowy Day, and I made sure my illustrator knew I wanted a little girl in her job. That was one of the books the Bank Street Center for Children's Literature said was the best of the year. An Angel for Mariqua is a book about a little girl whose mother was incarcerated because I had a little girl, a student, who was getting into fights a lot because kids were teasing her because her mom was in prison, and I said, don't worry about it. My brother spent some time in prison. I'm gonna find you a book that's a mirror. Could not find a single book about a little black girl with a mother who's incarcerated. So I wrote this. I submitted it to a major player in the industry after a friend introduced us, and she said, the little girl is too angry. I don't think anyone would identify with her. And I thought 2.7 million children could probably identify with her. A wave came through our windows. Another book that was chosen by the Bank Street and given a star for outstanding merit. Let the Faithful Come is another story I wrote right after 9-11, but recently published and asked my illustrator to have the illustrations reflect the refugee crisis in this country and abroad. Can never have enough books about black fathers. I wrote that as a tribute to my dad. And my dissertation was on lynching. And when I taught my first course on lynching, I told my students, I'm writing a picture book about lynching and they were horrified. Even though they were also angry that they hadn't learned about lynching until college. And I was like, well, if you didn't learn about it until college, when did you think you should have learned about it? When did you learn about the Holocaust? And we started talking about trauma when children are ready for these kinds of subjects. So I wrote Billy's Blues. So The Door at the Crossroads is my latest novel and it's a sequel to A Wish After Midnight. And I have been writer and residence at Weeksville Heritage Center. Has anybody been to Weeksville or heard of Weeksville? One person, all right. Well, that's one of the reasons I write about Weeksville so much. It was the second largest free black community in the United States prior to the Civil War. And so when I write historical fantasy, my kids don't get sent into some alternate universe or a castle in England. They stay in Brooklyn. They just go back in time to when Brooklyn was its own city and we had this thriving free black community challenged of course by things like slave catchers and the New York City draft riots. I also wrote a time travel story for younger kids, Deshaun's Gift, where a little boy goes back in time and meets Susan Smith McKinney-Steward who was the first African-American woman doctor in New York State. And then I go into schools and I compile student writing and we publish anthologies together. We've done three so far and the students are thrilled. They can be added to the Brooklyn Collection of the Brooklyn Public Library. And I'm working on a picture book. I did a competition to find an illustrator and Chase Walker's from Liberia. He's gonna be illustrating our book. So to conclude, how can I support indie authors? Read self-published books. Make a commitment right now that in the next month you're going to read one. You're just gonna give one a try. I know some of them are terrible. I do know that. I don't blame you. I understand why this stigma exists but there are just too many of us who have ability and have important stories and simply don't have the option of going the traditional route. If you like a book, please recommend it to others. Add indie titles to your library collection. School Library Journal, God bless them, has started a quarterly review column, Indie Voices, done by Amy Martin, fantastic Oakland Public Librarian. Ask your local bookseller to stock and not just special order books by indie authors. When you see events like this, please make sure self-published authors are included. And lastly, embrace alternate aesthetics. Don't hold all books to one visual standard. If you go see a film by Steven Spielberg who had a $300 million budget, it's going to look different than an indie film that had a budget of $10,000, right? So please keep that in mind. Otherwise, you will miss these kinds of fantastic books which are all excellent and a few of them have been reviewed by Amy Martin for School Library Journal. Everyone has a story to tell. You can make your own book at this website which is set up by Maya Gonzalez and her partner, Matthew Smith. Right now, make books. And if you have questions, you can contact me or talk to me later today. Thank you very much.