 We got to hear about Jacqueline Winston a little bit this morning and I wanted to ask each of our panelists maybe just to talk for a couple minutes about what brings them here today and then what they're excited about talking about and Laura, maybe we could start with you. Oh gosh, okay, hi. I'm very grateful to be here. Thank you so much and thank you to the institute and the library. Gosh, I'm here today. This is such an important issue to talk about. Having worked in the publishing industry in various ways, so children's book press, which I'm sure most of you will know about, as a non-profit publisher that was based in the Bay Area, then Orchard Books is a more kind of New York based but no longer an existence publisher and then Leon Lowe, an independent multicultural publisher. I saw a lot kind of from the production side, the creation of books, especially around representing diversity in children's books. And I think it's so important that we think about how the books are produced and the filters and some of what Jacqueline was talking about in her talk. That it's not just what we see but how these stories are told, who's telling them and what the publishers are doing, what they look like. So I guess that's something that I'm interested in us looking at more and how Meredith talked in the beginning about thinking about privilege and institutions and how dialogue and conversation happens. And I think looking at the ways that books are produced is really important. For me, a lot of my hope and interest is actually in the kind of alternative production that's happening. Aya doing it, you know, there are other people here, Jeanine from Blood and Press, Zadda, Elliot, Maya Gonzalez, lots of people who I think are starting to create these sort of different ways of thinking about telling stories and whose stories are being told. So I guess that's a piece I'd really love to talk more about. Hi, everyone. Thank you very much, Meredith, for inviting me to be here. I'm very excited to talk to you guys today about this issue, which has become a really major part of my career, which I did not expect, actually. But I think that because I came out of working in the LGBT media, I had already become accustomed to writing critically about issues in the media, especially regarding representation of minorities, specifically in my case when I worked at AfterEllen.com, which is a big website. It's kind of like Entertainment Weekly for lesbians. I mean, we were constantly talking about representation. So that seemed to be a natural outgrowth for me to talking about that in YA fiction because my books are all about queer girls. So for me, I'm excited to hear what questions Nina and all of you have with Diversity in YA. I've been talking about this stuff for a long time, so I'm always happy to discuss these issues. And I look forward to hearing our conversation. I'm incredibly honored to be here with such in such stellar company here on the panel in particular. And I'll just take a moment to tell my children's book, Writer Creation Story. Back in 2013, I was trying to sell this commercial adult novel and it was driving me nuts. And my daughter at the time was three and she was just becoming aware of racial differences. And, you know, you talked about mirrors, you know, mirrors and windows. I just felt such an urgent sense as she was becoming aware of race and images and magazine covers and what was around to have as many mirrors as possible. So I, you know, I'm a DIY type girl. When I was a kid, my mom used to color in the children in books with a magic marker. She would color them brown and use one to give them an afro, the black marker. And so I just felt like I should seize control of the visuals and there was more technology available. So I just made this little mix book with pictures out of my iPhone of my daughter and our friends and our family. And I made the book and, you know, we were, thank you, we were reading a lot of Dr. Seuss at the time. So I made a little text, Puffy here, Puffy there. Yay, I love my puffy hair. So that, you know, there were like five lines in the book. She was three, it went well. And I, when I put celebrities in there like Aretha Franklin and the Jackson fight, like I had no right to use their images, but it was just for us. I wasn't selling it. So, but then friends saw the book, they were like, oh my God, I love this book. We need to copy this book. You know, and so suddenly it became like, oh, there's actually a need, right? There's a need for this. And I was learning as I was trying to get an agent that it was not so easy to publish a book. And I was coming from a decade of being an independent artist, a slam poet, a hip hop theater artist, a spoken word artist touring around. And if I wanted to make a book, I went to the copy place and I made it and I was touring and people wanted it and I sold it and the industry was like so difficult to get into. So I was like, I'm not making a book. I don't want to make a book. And I don't have time because I'm a working artist mom. But that year, 2013, there were all of these reports of attacks on black girls for their hair. Right? Girls getting expelled from school for wearing dreadlocks. Girls getting thrown out of school for wearing afro puffs. Afro puffs being banned at a school, I believe in Ohio. Like it was just, it was constant and like the third one I was like, fine, I'll do the book. Like I have to do this book. And I just put out on the internet a call for photographs. You know, I put it on the my brown baby blog and my blog and sent it out and tweeted it out like send me your photographs. And people from all over the world sent photographs of people with puffy hair and families with puffy hair. It was like black people, Jewish people, Asian people, Latino people, like people from all over with puffy hair and a lot of children and it was amazing and I went through them and I made a book. And I self-published it and it was amazing to be able to then send the book to the people who had sent me pictures. You know, I got their little permissions and didn't use celebrities on the internet. And then went around with my daughter reading our book. You know, we read it at the Oakland Public Library and we read it to her class. So it was really about making that mirror. You know, making the mirror and then including people so that it was a literal mirror. Like the technology today meant that children could have a literal mirror of themselves in a book of people who looked like them. And you know, and then, and I was like, oh good, that's done. And because when you self-publish with some of these self-publishing folks, like they'd print it on demand. You really don't have to pay attention at all, which was good. And I went on and did manage to get a book deal for my grown-up book. But the thing that I just would speak to that so many of us have experienced is this incredible disorientation between, oh, there's my local librarian. And one of the things that I can speak to is this incredible disorientation that we experience as authors that when we go around reading our work or even talking about our work, people are like, I want that book. I need that book. And yet then when we interact with the industry, the industry is like, what? Who's going to read that? I don't really know. So that crazy in-between land that we live in wondering, well, am I wrong? Maybe I just know the 10 people who want this book. But no indeed, there is a greater demand. And it's also an interesting time as some industries are figuring that out. And then what does that look like and who has access? Anyway, those are some of the thoughts on my mind. Thank you. And I am going to move myself because I realize I'm standing behind those guys. And as I get started today, just to kind of set this up, the discussion of diversity in children's books is not a new discussion at all. And you'll see a lot of people point back to Nancy Larrick's 1963 article in the Saturday Review, The All-White World of Children's Books. That's now a landmark discussion that we point back to, but I'm sure that was not the beginning of it either. You know, I became a librarian in the mid-90s, and it was old news then. And Jacqueline Woodson and Rita Williams-Garcia were publishing their first novels. I was reading Rudine Sims Bishop, Smokey Knight won a Caldecott, and the Poirot Belpré Award was initiated. And then somehow in my experience, this discussion kind of fell apart. I remember us talking about racial stereotypes in Newberry winners that are excellent books, like Maniac, McGee, and Walk Two Moons. And there was a backlash against what was called political correctness, and then it became unfashionable to talk about this. And we were somehow past it. I, speaking of privilege, I had the privilege to write the cover story for a school library journal following the media award announcements. And in that article that came out in the March issue, I claimed that we haven't publicly tackled white privilege in standards for children's literature. And some people said to me on the side, yeah, we have been talking about it. But I don't believe that the status quo children's literature world has accepted yet that privilege plays in how we review, select, and award books. And I'm hoping that we can talk a little bit about that today. Jacqueline alluded to the way that social media has really put things in our face. And I think that we have to have those discussions now. I think the discussions are happening in the world at large, but we haven't yet had those discussions within the world of children's literature criticism. Privilege is not just the intellectual exercise that we are going to treat it today. It really is a life and death issue for many people. And I believe that all of us who are here do the work that we do with young people's books because we want to give them tools to make their lives better. If that is true, then we have some very hard work to do individually and together to acknowledge the power that privilege plays in the creation, publication, promotion, selection, and awarding of books for young people. Each of us comes here with a different level of familiarity, understanding, and comfort with this discussion. And it's a little bit hard to know where to jump in, and we may grind our gears a little bit today. But I'm going to tell you about what I've been coming to understand about myself over the last year. I've always known that children's literature and librarianship is overwhelmingly white and female. I know that it's important to have diversity among our ranks, more of it, and that we have to make room to bring more perspectives to the table. I always have known that it's important for those of us who are white or come from other places of privilege to keep an open mind, recognize our biases, and to let that be at play. But it's only recently that I've really begun to understand how keeping an open mind becomes a problem in itself if we believe we're being open-minded and that becomes a barrier. I believe in standards for quality children's literature because I believe that children deserve the best writing that speaks to them as people first, not first as the children their parents want them to be. But I think we talk about these standards as if they exist or were born out of nothing. And here I'm going to ask you to do a mental exercise. I was going to figure out how to do this on the computer, but we're going to do this truly virtually. And you're just going to think of things. You're not going to share anything. Welcome members of the Newberry Committee. We're so excited to have you guys all here today. And we have a very important job in front of us. And before we get started selecting the most important books for the Newberry, I want you all to think in your mind of your favorite Newberry book from when you were a child. Okay, now that you have that book in your mind, think about the audience and pretend that we're the Newberry Committee and we're each sharing our titles. And just imagine the titles that are being shared in the room. And now think of that group of titles and who are the protagonists in these books. So that's our canon. And you go through the year doing the work that you do to be as open-minded as possible, bringing new, looking at books in different ways for the Newberry. But at the end of the year, you're sitting there with a ballot, you're going to vote for your first, second, and third most favorite book, which book most deserves that Newberry medal. And you're going to think back to the titles that have won the Newberry in the past. And as soon as we do that, we've started closing the door a little. All those titles deserve to win the Newberry. They're all incredible books and they all set standards. But what standards do they set? Why are these the stories that get to set our standards? Who holds the power? Where is the privilege in children's books? So we're going to try to open the door a little bit. And I have some questions for our panelists. I'm going to kind of direct questions to one person or the other, but I hope that we can jump in. And I'm leaving time to bring in questions from the audience too. So do think about questions as you have them. I think we've got to hear a little bit from Jacqueline about your process of becoming a writer and reading your book if you've all read Brown Girl Dreaming. That comes out as well. And I would just heard a little bit from you about how and why you wrote Puffy. But I'd be interested in hearing a little bit more from each of you. And from Melinda, maybe we'll start with you about your path to Children's RYA publishing. I think all three of you, I think, have all been writers all your lives. So was this a path that was always clear to you? Was there anything interesting about getting to your first publication that you'd like to share with us? Well, yeah, I've always wanted to be a writer. I remember making up stories with my paternal grandmother when I was really little, like five or six years old. We had a bag of ragdoll teddy bears and we would pull them out. I would sit with her on her bed and we would tell stories about them. My paternal grandmother was white. She was one of the few women who lived in China, the People's Republic of China, during the Cultural Revolution. And I was born there. We came to the U.S. in 1978 when I was about four. And my grandmother, one of the first things she did was write a memoir about her life. So it was published in 1980. It was called In the Eye of the Typhoon. And her name was Ruth Earnshaw Lowe. And because she was one of the first American women to tell this story, it was a major big deal that she went on a book tour when they had them, you know? She was like on CBS and stuff. It was crazy. And I remember this very vividly because I knew from a very early age, I knew a professional writer. So my grandmother always encouraged me to write. And without her I would not have written, I would not have continued, you know? And that's why Ash, my first novel, is dedicated to her, even though she passed away before I finished it so she never was able to read it. But on the other side of the coin, we have my grandmother encouraging me. And then we have my parents, who are, you know, Chinese immigrants, who are like, you can't be a writer. Literally they would tell me this, you can't be a writer. That is a stupid idea. I remember having dinner and they'd be like, you can't be a writer. You can't be a writer. You can't be a writer. My whole childhood growing up, you can't be a writer. You have to get a job. Preferably you should be an engineer. So when I went to college, I did not major in English or creative writing. I was like, whatever, I can't be a writer. So I majored in economics and I love economics. Honestly, it's totally fascinating. I'm completely addicted to that Planet Money podcast. It's super fascinating and it tells you so much about how the world works. I am so grateful that I was an economics major. However, I didn't really want to be a banker. You know, like I interviewed to be a banker. I didn't get the job. One of the guys who interviewed me called me up later and was like, I'm sorry, you don't get the job, but good luck in your career as a writer. So that was, yeah, I learned a lot from that interview. So it took me a long time to come around to it. I had to try all sorts of other jobs because I grew up thinking I can't be a writer and I know a lot of Asian Americans grow up with parents who tell them these things. You can't be creative. You must be a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer is fine. Maybe computer science is really good. Do that computer stuff. Or you could be an astronaut. That's totally fine. But writer, artist, actor, anything that involves creative arts, a lot of times it's kind of beaten out of you not because they don't respect or admire those things. My mother is a professional musician. It's because they want you, they know how hard it is in this country to be an immigrant, an Asian immigrant in this country. It is a hard job to do. And they know that you have to make money and you have to be able to pay the rent and buy food. And they don't want you to be wasting your time on these pursuits that just do not pay well. Chinese people are pretty, they're going to lay it out for you. So it took me a long time to give myself the permission to go for it because my parents had given me so much opportunity and had supported my education so much. I grew up knowing that I deserved to go to Harvard. So it was like I did, I eventually got there. And I had to show myself that, sure I could do these things that my immigrant parents wanted, but there was still room for me to follow the path that I truly loved. It just took me a really long time. So it took me eight years to write my first novel. There was a long time when I didn't write. I wrote in three novels in high school on my own. They never saw the light of day. But then I had took a long break when I tried to not be a writer. And it was really not right for me. So my path to becoming a novelist was actually, it took me 35 years. And now that I'm there and doing this, I never want to stop ever. I mean, I will never stop. It doesn't matter what the publishing industry does to me. I will continue to write books. Can you tell us about getting your first novel published? Ash was really a fairytale experience for me. It is a fairytale retelling. It's a retelling of Cinderella with a lesbian twist. And I actually did not think it was going to sell. I thought it was like a ludicrous crazy idea because I'd never read a book like that. So I was like, where is this coming from? This is really not a good idea. But ultimately I did it. And I found an agent in my first batch of submissions. I'm still with her. And we sold it within two weeks of her sending it out. We had five offers from publishers. And it was really astonishing. I did not realize how rare that was at the time. But you know, reality slowly started to seep in. Ira, Jackie, do you want to jump in a little? Yeah, I guess I can just say my path to sort of writing books has been a path of distraction and capacity development. I started out really interested in writing books in my 20s. And I just didn't have the attention span and the capacity to kind of sit in the solitude with myself and by myself to write. And so I got really distracted by more interactive and extroverted forms like spoken word and hip hop theater and SLAM, which were all awesome and really enjoyable in themselves and great ways to create. And I was able to sort of develop my voice in terms of social commentary and with poetry I really learned how to write word by word and really think about every word and the music and the imagery. But it's really only in my 40s that I've come back around to fully have the attention span to apply myself to writing, which is really good because as a mom, you cannot waste one second. You have to really be able to get in there and focus and write. So that's been a little bit of my path back to writing. I think about writing books as being sort of a sit-down writer, which is much more compatible with parenting than say the more performative stuff which is happening at night in nightclubs and touring. So I feel like I've had a few different lives as a writer. So, you know, similar to Melinda, I came out of a family that was not very supportive about the arts in that way. And the same thing, I mean, my family migrated from the South and as part of that great migration, you were going to come to this new country and you were going to make something of yourself. And so the North was that new country. So they discouraged it at the same time I was being taken to the library once a week and made to read and always made to sit for many hours to study first, you know, as an academic and also as a witness. We had to spend lots of hours studying the watchtower and the wake in the Bible so that we could, we would know what we were talking about. And you spent lots of hours being bored. And I think those are all the tools for being a writer. So there was, again, that mixed message of don't do this, here's how you do it. And then when I was in college and I took a, someone recommended a writing class at the new school and it was a writing class with a woman named Bonnie Gabel and I went into it, I think it was in my junior year and it was, you know, E.L. Konnesberg was sitting on it, Judy Bloom, like Amy Curd, I was like, what? You know, it was such a jackpot of a class because it was just every writer I had read as a kid coming through there. And I met a woman named B.B. Willoughby when my teacher read a part of Last Summer with Mayden who said, I want to buy this. And so she bought it for Bantam Double Day Dell which became Random House and then she promptly quit. I like to think it was because she saw what a mess it was and she's like, I'm out of here. And so then it sat on the shelf for a while and then Wendy Lamb picked it up and Wendy Lamb was my editor for many, many, many years and that was kind of the beginning and I know that too, it was during a time, so it was in the 80s and the early 90s where the door was open. So they realized that there was not a lot of diversity in children's books and that we needed to refresh the pool that had been Virginia Hamilton and Walter D. Myers and the McKessics and a lot of the, and John Steptoe, you know, so all of the older writers were getting older and so that's the door I came in and I feel like that's kind of trying to happen again. I feel like that door is open and that because of the dialogues that are being had and the realization that there is, there is not a lot of books out there. There is not enough out there. Yeah, that's a good, I'm going to change the next question to talk more about publishing then as well, how we get those voices in the door and some of the barriers and challenges that may stand in the way because of the expectations of the, or the status quo of the publishing industry and Laura, I'm going to, maybe we can start with you. I mean, you talked in a speech you gave about working with a Native American author on a book and that you called Fantasy and they had to explain to you that this was not actually, what you read as Fantasy was not actually Fantasy. I had an experience of, I don't remember where I was reading off this review of a book where I said, oh, the pacing of the narrative is all off because it goes on, it's like it's too long or it's like it was supposed to end here and someone had to point out to me that, well, this was, I was expecting to hear things that happen in threes and that comes out of European folklore and what I was reading was something where the story happens in four which just comes out of a different culture and actually the pacing was perfect but it wasn't to my ear just because I didn't realize that this wasn't a universal. Do you want to use that as a jump off-floor to talk about, I mean, what are the, are there expectations that we have for children's literature that are based in a culture of white privilege that might be preventing authors getting in the door? Yes. There we go, yes. I mean, I think on so many different levels. I mean, I guess my learning curve on this was first of all just as an individual, right, and working as an editor and I didn't go to editor's school or, you know, I started working and that's how I learned and even learning at children's book press which was a non-profit multicultural bilingual picture book publisher, that was really the remit, it was mission-driven, which I think is how all publishers really should be but yeah, I have my own bias and experience and what feels natural and comfortable to me and I felt like it took quite a few years of working at multicultural publishers where this is what we were supposed to be thinking about and it isn't necessarily that overtly even part of the dialogue and I think the more that publishers function within a kind of more mainstream environment or the society within which we live, that kind of self-reflection doesn't necessarily happen and what my experience was is that if you're thinking about a market and if you're thinking about profit when you're publishing that sometimes a sort of lowest common denominator thinking can come into play too about what's publishable and what isn't. I've written in a couple of different essays but about a book, Deshaun Days that I worked on where there was a mention of crack vials in it and at the time there was discomfort, oh well, librarians in Texas or Kansas won't buy a picture book if it has crack vials in it and the discussion sort of with the author was well for some kids, this is just part of their life, it's reality. So I think that question of who's being seen as an insider, who's stories being told and how the market is perceived, all of these things are so shaping of the stories and then also really who tells them and who they're telling them to. I mean it just, right, publishing doesn't happen in a vacuum and it represents a world that Jacqueline was talking about about people living in all of these different experiences and that tends to be white privilege dominated, the narratives that we get, what you watch TV, what you see in advertisements, everything around and it's very, very difficult to see that if you're not living this existence where you're having to see or speak in different ways and I think, I don't see very many publishers doing real work I would say on this issue. I just don't think it's a priority and we need diverse books as getting noise and as attention but I think until really deep uncomfortable this conversation start happening I don't think it's going to change. So just to jump in there a minute, I think publishers do have a mission and the mission is to make money. And so I think economics is what's going to change the conversation. I think it's hard to separate the fact that publishers are big business and I think that's what you were saying about self-publishing. I think that's important. What speaks is the pocketbook, the wallet. So how do we get the message? Because we try to diversify publishing, right? But the truth is publishing doesn't always pay a lot and so the people who are coming into it are coming from some means so that they can have these low paying jobs so they're not coming from the same experience as someone who can be more diverse in some ways. I know there are people of all races who have privilege but in that case it seems a lot of the people who are attracted to publishing are not necessarily people of color but the question is how do we create change within when the change is not conducive to what they want which is to make money. And that's what I'm not sure how... Because what needs to happen is that more people need to demand like this is not a book I'm going to buy. And I do it. I do the same thing. Two brown kids and every day it's a decision. Every eight from what they watch to what they read to what movies we pay to see on Christmas. I remember we're going to see Selma and Annie and that's it. Because I finally got sick and tired of them having all these windows and no mirrors and I also saw the impact that it had on them but it is I'll walk into a bookstore and I'll try to find that book that's by a person of color with characters of color in it. And that's me doing my part but I think that demand that has to be we have to show that demand through saying you know what I'm stepping back from this I'll go buy ten copies of the crossover and give it to everybody because I want to put my money where my mouth is and create change that way. I think that also we need to well I don't know how this is going to happen because I feel like big publishing is so big and it moves so slowly and people like us and the We Need Diverse books maybe can get there but we have no access to their sales and marketing teams and I feel like there's like I feel like there's a lack of engagement on the part of big publishing with the actual people who live in the world like there's there's a market out there okay you know having worked at AfterEllen there are millions of queer women out there who really want to watch Oranges in the New Black or read what you know what I mean like they're out there they're just underserved so they're not waiting in line at Barnes & Noble because they don't think there's going to be anything there for them anyway so what are they going to do they're just waiting there you know so there has to be an effort on the part of big publishing to reach out to the people who exist and I am hopeful that the movement which has coalesced so much around social media and We Need Diverse books I really hope that there can be some kind of outreach or effort to make the business look at the actual market one of the things to say to sort of jump in is there's a piece to self publishing that's a little bit double edged because part of what self publishing then does is self publishing becomes the market research that the big five publishers don't want to do so they allow the writers on their own dime to go out there and hustle and try their books to make it happen and then when those self publishing numbers get to a certain point and there's a certain amount of momentum then publishers can say ooh let's talk because you've actually done all the work and now we can just put you on our conveyor belt to mass produce you so that's one of the things that's um and self publishing offers opportunities to people who would never even be able to get into that position right so it it is double edged in that way and I think um you know the big for me one of the things that's interesting to watch shifting has to do with this notion of mirrors because communities marginalized communities around race sexuality gender class nation we've always been hungry for those mirrors but part of what has to shift in order for things to shift more deeply is for mainstream readers to not just be interested in the window like ooh what's happening in you know Tanzania right now but sort of the notion that I can identify with this protagonist that I as sort of a white middle-class girl in Wyoming can look at this girl of color um you know or a marginalized person and see myself and really identify and it's been interesting having a five-year-old seeing like the white girl come to preschool in her Dora pajamas you know and the white boy in the Doc Mcstuffins lunch box that there's something that's starting to shift a little and I think you know having a black president has really shifted something in the consciousness it has for anyone who is laboring under the the delusion that it's fixed everything it has not and I don't think you're in this room but many have that delusion but there's something about leadership and role modeling that is shifting because there is a way that we're starting to see more stories both in our actual national leadership in film and television of people of color as leaders and central and so it's going to take a while for that to really kind of shift into the kinds of books that folks can see and then there's also the other thing I'll just say in publishing is sort of the fake diversity right so my daughter is now interested every librarian will know this and perhaps grown the rainbow magic series right so the fairies right there's like hundreds and hundreds of these books ghost written like there's a there's like a cave of writers that go straight these books all day long there are just hundreds of them and you know they have different color fairies right so you look at them so I was I was introduced to them we're of course at the library and it's story time and my daughter's like oh look fairy books so there's like a hundred of them so I'm like desperately going through and like weeding out the white ones and finding all the brown ones yes we can take 20 of these home they're all like brown fairies there were a hundred books and and yet even though we have brown and Asian and black fairies on the cover the the core of the story is about two white girls in a white town you know and the fairy narrative is all European mythologically inspired so it's the other thing that's important about diverse books is how diverse is it right is are we talking about skin deep or are we talking about that we're really having an alternative perspective that there's a depth of difference that speaking to marginalized communities and that I think is also needs to be part of the story as well so in the other part where the money circles background is not just within the publishing it's I'm also hearing it among the authors you know whether your family raises you to believe that writing is a viable profession or whether you have to indiegogo your own books into production but there's also many issues on the side of who's if we talk about creating a demand for these books who are the gatekeepers for that demand booksellers librarians teachers and that those are all professions that don't librarians were getting probably paid the best of them but those are also professions somewhat of privilege either they really don't have anything or they require a master's degree and when we look at reviews which create some of that demand the reviewing does not pay I mean the there are some the horn book and Kirkus will have staff writers and you get kind of a pittance that doesn't it's not really an hourly wage even to have SLJ which is really the main place for children's book reviews it produces the most children's book reviews depends on volunteers many of who are probably in this room you guys get a copy of the book right so who has the ability and privilege to write these reviews and then what do we see reflected in these reviews you know another many issues that these reviews have gotten shorter and shorter and shorter over the years and we all kind of have our short hand and lingo for what how we talk about them and how then how do we talk about diversity and culture in these reviews who is how can we how can we as reviewers when we're talking about who is the reader for this book how can we make room for the girl from Wyoming to you know to show that she really she's the reader for how it went down by Ketclah Magoon I mean and Melinda I was really intrigued by your perspective on reviews in your blog because coming to them from a writer's perspective and not a reviewer's perspective and maybe you can just share a little bit about some of the things that you've noticed in reviews sure well for diversity in YA we do these lists of new releases every week the new diverse books that are coming out every week and by first books at diversity in YA we only talk about books in which the main character is the person of color LGBTQ or disabled so I'm sorry your gay best friend doesn't count and so we in order to post these these lists of books I read reviews of them because I'm constantly trying to figure out if a book has diverse content and honestly a lot of the time the book cover obscures it so I have to read the reviews and I just go and read the trade reviews and over the past several years as I do this I've noticed a lot of things pop up that are just kinda like huh yeah they reveal a certain perspective a certain privileged white centered perspective on the part of the reviewer when they situate this book there in the in the trade review journal so I did a really long post on diversity in YA I think it's like 6,000 words so it's really long you know get some coffee first in which I talk about various issues that arise in the text of these reviews and it's true that I am a novelist now in the past I was a reviewer I mean I was an entertainment critic so I've written tons of reviews you know and a lot of my reviews probably were horrible and I probably would have as I started out you know you take up reviewing as a freelance writer because that's the job that there is you know it doesn't pay well it pays really crappy but you have to get your byline out there and get a background so that is when I was reviewing when I knew the least about what was going on you know the more experience you get the less you do reviews because they don't pay so you're gonna move on to writing features as soon as you can so writing this post I did draw from my experience as a reviewer also as an editor you know I eventually became an editor of reviews and I obviously also write books and have received reviews of my books it's an interesting dilemma because writing book reviews is really hard especially if you only have like a paragraph to do it in and you have to get across all the salient points you know in a concise way it is really hard I totally acknowledge that and that's why for me in this post it was more about talking about the collective responsibility of the trade journal working with the editor and the reviewer to make sure these books are presented in a way that is fair to the story being told so the post is really long so I can't really summarize it too much here basically an attempt to show how unspoken biases are revealed through these book reviews a lot of times we don't say things out loud about race or sexuality that you know we might think in our head but in a review sometimes people say it I thank them for saying it because a lot of times people are like there's no proof that there's racism this is institutionalized systemic racism it is not that the reviewer is a bigot it's that these are the beliefs that have permeated their consciousness for their entire life and is being revealed unconsciously in a way in these reviews I'm really grateful that these reviews exist because it gave me something to look at and examine in an impersonal way I did not mean it as a personal attack to anyone it was more of an analysis of what is happening throughout the entire industry but it seems it seems so important to have you write a piece like that because the reviews are out there they've been out there forever right and people are reading them without necessarily thinking critically about them and I think that's where this discussion in terms of critiquing came out also with the horn book and this question of reviewing self published books or not and with Roger Sutton saying there's not really that need for self publishing because anything's publishable pretty much which I would disagree with I think it's so important to think about and as librarians and the review sources that you have you have a lot of power in your low paid you know honorable work but to be providing access to books that maybe aren't coming out of the big publishers that have all of the promotion and the kind of emphasis that there are people who are needing to do this and bringing in perspectives that wouldn't necessarily make it through so I think that's a powerful position If you want to share anything about your experience as a consultant with smaller or starting publishers and reviews and I'm so excited, I think for me part of why I left publishing is I'm a radical left coast Berkeley girl I think the publishing industry was hard for me as a person working within it and I am loving being in San Francisco surrounded by some of the people in this room who are doing I think publishing books that wouldn't get through Jeanine Mcbeth over there who runs Blood Orange Press her book Oh Oh Baby Boy has which is a beautiful book but it's got a birth canal spread that I don't think the mainstream publishers would be comfortable with you know Zad Elliott who's sitting back there who's created an incredible self published book you know has got a picture book coming out about lynching you know or looking at incarceration or issues that you know Jacqueline's gotten you've gotten them some of these things into your books but it is not easy and when you get it in how you position it I'm not sure if Kate Schatz is here she was going to come who's written there she is written Rad American Women A to Z which has sold out of its first two print runs as it's just come out sorry I'm like but that city lights publisher so it is a publisher but at San Francisco base it's their first children's books and how many books do you have they're gonna have A's for Angela Davis as the first person that they say so I think this is where to me the hope personally I've kind of fed up with the mainstream publishing industry I just I don't want to be there myself so I am very grateful to be in a place and find that there's this world of people creating books that I think would not pass through the kind of gatekeeping structures that are there and I think yeah there's a question of money there's a question of market how do you get an audience but I guess I want to be idealistic and think people doing it for themselves people are starting to do it and I think there's like I said so much power in librarians to get these books to kids that are gonna mean so much to them in that mirror sense so yeah that's what I'd say you know on just on a basic level though in talking about um the presentation of books I so often and I don't know um how other people feel about this but there's so often when I think about the qualifiers and the qualifiers through a mainstream gaze so that you know when a book of mine is presented this book is about a little black boy who is if it's a book that's not a person of color not a queer kid so it's just that so here's this book is about a boy or this book is about a girl and so those qualifiers you know automatically take something out of the mainstream and also shift the gaze so um I think in terms of presentation at what point what information needs to be said um that's I was in a bookstore in my neighborhood and it was great because there was this um this uh orthodox Jewish family had come in and the boy um the 12 year old boy had just read the crossover and was looking for something else and and um you know the mother kept saying well there are other books about those kind of boys this is like okay well you can say black boys in this situation but um but you know someone had put that book in his hand and said he said I asked him you know how did you how did you get that book and he said someone told me it was a book about basketball and and you know and I loved it and I thought okay I want to meet this librarian who was able to see this 6 foot tall 12 year old boy you know the yarmulke and the curls and and say okay here's a book you would love about basketball and I think that doesn't always happen that way and the qualifiers are hard because I feel like this is this is what shut down the conversation um for in the 90s was the sense that we're not we're we're past this and we don't need to call out the books we've got Jacqueline Woodson and we've got Rita Williams Garcia you know you know it's done all right and but we need to know as the selectors for materials if we need those materials we need to know which ones they are and I I feel like as a you know as a reviewer and someone who reads reviews I I just feel like okay we're not there yet we thought we were there but we have to someday we'll be able to stop qualifying people within reviews but for now we have to correct an imbalance and so we have to call it out but the imbalance the but the how come it's not called alpha white folks you know that's the other thing I I'm perfectly fine with it but I never hear someone say this book is about a white boy unless it's a person of color you know talking about the book because we always talk about race but but I don't see it done in reviews that way yeah I think it's the things we don't see right like with Maya Gonzalez back there in her latest book which has got a gender neutral child in it and you wrote in the Huffington Post about how reviewers you know you can start to see what comes through what assumptions people make but it's often hard to see unless it's something that is right in your face right that's why reviews are great because they have to write it down so when we get to the action part of the day we might start talking about whether ACL is an organization wants to consider our style guide and how we call out these things within reviews I want to start taking some questions from the floor without because I have more questions but I'm sure you guys too do too and maybe Meredith will pass the mic I'm assuming there's some questions there's one all the way in the back corner Meredith make me work for it this question is really part comment and it's also for the librarians I'm mostly an adult services librarian though I'm doing a lot of children's now and I'm finding this throughout if I do a display that has a black person or a person who looks Hispanic or Chinese on the cover it's really hard to hand sell it to somebody to take that book out and I want to ask how it is that I guess I'm asking it of the librarian how it is that white librarians sell books that are not about white people because I live in a neighborhood that's very white I live in a neighborhood of people who read highly educated and I don't see my colleagues necessarily handing out that book that has the Asian kid on the cover or that's about an Hispanic person or that's about a black person the way I hand out books about white people so as a follow-up this is my question is are you are you talking about hand-selling to the parents or hand-selling to the kids to kids to somebody walking right by I find that okay when it's black history month we put out the black history books when it's Hispanic American month we put out the and it's Chinese New Year we put out the but how about we put out the good books how about we put out the one that was so funny or we put out the how are we doing that that includes people who are not who are not white how are we doing that hmm and I'm asking the librarian well that's me and I you know other people in the audience may have thoughts too I mean I ask the question back because in my experience I think that kids are more receptive than the adults are and so I think that having what you've just alluded to having the books out all the time and creating displays that speak to actual interests of kids creating displays throughout your library and and really well and the other thing is you have to have the books so you have to you have to buy them and you have to have them in volume so that the books that you face out in your library which you know hopefully do throughout your library because that's how kids take them are balanced and you have to actually spend a lot of time just merchandising your books in the library in a way that we're not we're not always used to I think also in libraries that we need to depend more on our entire staff our volunteers who are hanging out in the library because kids don't always want to take a book from an adult can you can your teen volunteers make a book display it's probably more likely that that kids and teens will take books from that display and who are the trusted people in your library who can hand sell books to kids in your library I would just add we've talked a little bit about this notion of white privilege but there's just another word that seems like it's the moment to bring out in the room and that's just the language of white supremacy so part of what we're looking at in terms of books is the presumption that books about white people are books by and about white people are better more interesting that those characters are more universal and that everybody is interested in their lives and part of what we're actually bumping into is actual racism you know because part of what racism says is that the lives of people of color and queer folks and folks with disabilities they're just not very interesting they don't think very good thoughts they've proven that they're extra funny or have won a gold medal in the Olympics or something well then that person is exceptional but really your average people in those communities we don't care about their lives I mean that's the whole conversation Black Lives Matter that our lives matter and then our stories also matter and so that's sort of part of what we're up against and I think the notion librarians are actually being specifically put in a position where you can either go with the flow which is that everybody's going to be attracted to the covers with the images of the people who look the way that they've been taught you're supposed to look interesting or you're going to actively resist and interrupt that narrative of white supremacy and so and it's a big job and it's not just publishers and librarians fault because I think for publishers I believe that racism is out there and they're like well my job is to sell as many as I can and so clearly if I have white celebrities so and so on the cover I don't have to worry about it because that brand is already established and will sell itself but if I have an unknown person of color then I have to fight for it and it's really just about deciding to fight and I think that the fake diversity that you alluded to is especially insidious in this way too because you know do sure I would I'd love to I think it's important to have all the brown rainbow fairies out there to get just so that kids can have them and to get the community who's not used to picking up books with color people on the cover used to it but if that's what's getting published and written the lives and stories are not actually getting published and written and how do we create the demand in the door for that I know there was another question over here and I think Meredith has the mic for you I'll be very brave so I'm coming from the perspective of being a former bookseller so it's a bad handing the book out to the readers and making people interested in reading out of their comfort zone so but what I wanted to encourage all I love librarians that's why I'm here I sneak my way into here but I just there's no sneaking I think one of the ways to be able to give those books with people of color on the cover to let's say a white population start with a grass root movement I just want to encourage you to not be discouraged and all those little steps that you're taking they really content they make a difference so one of the things I want to add is diversify your sources you cannot just rely on the publishers what is it called the booklets they're going to recommend of course the books that they publish and the ones they believe in but the world has changed so quickly and it's still happening they are such a diverse source of just way to put books out there about self-publishing there are smaller publishers and all that and I know you only have such a limited time but I just want to encourage you to diversify where you're looking for those books so one of the ways I'm thinking of Tani Tadeves and we met at a former conference she has put on taken on the task to go through as many self-published books she can to just pick out the ones she considers the best not based on her own reading but she's like going through so many blogs out there and putting a database and hoping to just share it with whoever's interested I live in Davis, California and the library over there reached out to me to help them also not just to recommend books but help them build a database of those books that won't be labeled as this is a book for black people this is a book for Asian and things like that action, section, adventures you know, things like that but make sure that those sections those categories are diversified but what I'm really trying to say is start with all of you just changing your habits it's normal to stick with what you know you've been trained a certain way but just also sorry because English is a bit sometimes my brain is really weird but yeah I'm just trying to change your habits it really it starts with you Thank you and it's talk about when you talk about needing to make go out and look in other places for books what's happening in libraries right now it has to do with money they streamline the selection and collection development so that usually that's filtered through one person we can only use the major vendors it has to happen lightning fast it's all based on reviews we're doing that in order to be able to spend more time on the floor with the public but I think we have to recognize that part of that rich work that we need to do with the public needs to go back and we need to all the time we're saving through centralized collection development we need to spend some more time seeking out the books that we're not getting that way and I think we have time for one more question yep I know unless we want to go over time this is partly a comment but I'm curious what the panel has to say about it too I do collection management for Oakland Public Library and I've seen some of the same thing happen where we get the books that are harder to handle that have diverse characters but what I've noticed is and I think I suspect this is a tendency of the big publishers is to kind of funnel authors of color illustrators of color into very serious issue based books and those books they're a little bit difficult to get kids interested in but all over Oakland I'm finding when we have books that are fun that are cheerful that have smiling kids on the cover that are people of color we cannot keep them on the shelf I have all my selectors come to me and say these books are completely gone they are gone all the time I had three copies of Puffy at my last library which was in a primarily African American neighborhood every time I turned them face out they were gone immediately because they're cheerful kids and maybe some of you can comment on whether that's something that happens in publishing and how we can work on that right there in the red shirt the publishers aren't putting out anything but those serious books I feel like Fantasy is a huge place where I've had trouble finding diverse books I mean actually Zad and I on the way over were talking about this the kind of shifts that have happened and that you were talking about for like a children's book press in 1975 it was folklore that was kind of the gateway of like okay this is how we're going to bring in diversity and that happened for a while and then it sort of shifted and it became only realistic stories and no folk tales but I think that is really where the next shift needs to be is entertaining books but not just like that you were saying stories that are kind of whitewashed but you know that there's authenticity and specificity to the stories and that they're not just western fairy tale I think there is fantasy out there I think it's harder to find but with the internet it is way easier so I really encourage you to check out diversitynya.com we have a lot of book lists there there are a number of fantasy book lists I think because Cindy and I are both Asians who wrote fantasy and science fiction and so we love fantasy and science fiction and we try to feature those books as much as we can I know that there are book lists I don't know if we need diverse books as book lists do you think? they have a book list but I don't know if it's genre specific so there are lists online it does require some legwork on your part I think that it is true that a lot of books about minorities are often presented as serious issue books and I think that is for a number of reasons partly because of white supremacy because there is some seems to be some belief that minorities can only have serious lives and also I think that there is a tendency for these books to be serious because it is the serious books who win the awards and for a writer who is struggling to get a story published about a diverse cast if they know that it is going to be a hard sell at least you could win some awards that will keep it in print for a while that will keep it in print for a while so there are a lot of factors at work here so I think one way to get more diverse genre fiction is for awards to recognize them and I think that would be wonderful because I think there is so much wonderful fantasy and science fiction being published and a lot of times it is just relegated to the best seller lists except the diverse ones don't really get there so I was going to say and I think that it is a balancing act because on the one hand part of dealing with systematic racism homophobia and heterosexism and transphobia ableism is to deal with the oppression so you don't want books that are like I am just going through the world all as well because there is something that is missing there that is great though so you really want we would want a spectrum within communities of books that are light and cheerful and books that also speak to the struggle but we don't want that kind of everything to be so grim and I also think that there is a larger there is a larger way that people of color from those different communities are supposedly our only expertise is on our community so recently there was this conversation about how the majority I am going to paraphrase it but the majority of Latinos or Latinas who are quoted in the media was only on issues of immigration reform so the hashtag ask me mas I actually know about other things some Latina writers started this hashtag because they were like actually so I think that is part of it too the book about basketball that we could be writing about other things and it's hard because you don't want to be like oh I just happened to be black or I just happened to be Latina but it's all happening simultaneously and the focus doesn't have to be on the grimness of racism thankfully it's not a question it's just a comment that I want to draw our attention to for a moment and that's that I'm still really hearing a lot of white focus so we're talking about diversity but it's like how do we sell these books to white kids to white families and how does this markability work in the white culture and the status quo and breaking things down so just for a moment I want to notice that we're still really positioning ourselves facing white thank you Maya we could do this all day but we want to continue the discussion after lunch in a few different ways and I want to make sure that you guys all have time to spend time with our authors and to buy their books which is an action that you're going to take today and to close up the panel I'm going to ask each of the panelists just to say really briefly this is I think one of the hardest things for us in this room is we keep on kind of getting this discussion started and we get a little bit farther each time and then our time runs out we try to spend some more time today on this and we're going to end with some action items to continue the discussion but how do we keep this discussion from fizzling out again if you have one thing you want to ask the participants in this room to think about or to do what would you ask them I think I'd probably mirror what Natalie said about being maybe more open and creative about finding books as librarians I think that would be it I think that's what I would say too there are a lot of resources online and I feel like I'm I mean diversity in YA is just my thing but I do think we've put a lot of work in there to put together lists of books for you to look at so please go online please look so if you don't just because you can't find something off the top of your head does not mean it doesn't exist yeah yeah diversityNYA.com and we have a bibliography also that you're going to get diversity as part of part of today yeah I think the biggest thing that I would say to everybody is that this is a really really long struggle and to be committed for life to have the optimism that we can end racism in our lifetime but also understand that we need to stay connected to each other and keep fighting not to be discouraged and to also understand that what we're battling for at the level of books and stories is really about what we want in terms of justice for the larger world hmm yeah justice justice no peace I was just thinking the hashtag how can I shift I think this is so much about shifting perspective you know I can't come back to the qualifiers enough I'm so done with those qualifiers I I think the thing whenever I turn into a book to my editor after I've rewritten it like 20 times and I'm like Nancy this book is finally finished she reads and she says this is a great beginning so that's what I think about today I think it's a great beginning thank you