Tag Archives: diversity

This Week in Diversity: Looking At History and Faces

Another Friday is here, and we have another round of links to articles we think you’ll appreciate. Enjoy, and feel free to come back and comment on what you thought.

Our first reading suggestion comes from the New York Times. This year is the 150th anniversary of the start of the civil war, and the Times has a new column, disunion, that follows the war’s developments, day by day but a century and a half later. You can start at the beginning, or you may be particularly interested in Jim Crow on West Broadway, about a young African American man who refused to get off a whites-only streetcar, a hundred years before Claudette Colvin and Rosa Parks.

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This Week in Diversity: Prizes and Veterans

There’s been a lot of chatter about prizes lately!

The ALA has added another children’s book award—and more diversity. The new Stonewall Award for Children’s & Young Adult Literature Award will be recognizing books for young readers relating to the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender experience.

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Native American Heritage Books

It’s Native American Heritage month, and do we ever have recommendations for you! You can go to our site and see all our Native American titles, but we’re going to highlight a couple of them today.

Sky Dancers is a majestic story of the Mohawk steal workers who built the skyscrapers of New York City, as seen through the eyes of a young boy. On weekends, John Cloud lives with his parents on the reservation in upstate New York, but during the week his father is off in the city. When his mother takes him to New York, John Cloud is proud to see his father high above the city on a crossbeam of the Empire State Building. The Art Deco-influenced art and John Cloud’s independent mind make this book stand as tall as a skyscraper.

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This Week in Diversity: Conferences, Movies, and Visualizing the World

October’s a busy time of year for conferences! At the New England Independent Bookseller’s Association conference, they had a panel on Selling Color in a White World. Our own Stacy Whitman of Tu Books participated—though, due to subway flooding, she joined the discussion via phone. Author Mitali Perkins and bookseller Elizabeth Bluemle shared their experiences from the panel.

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A is for (Amazing) Anansi

 

from Nicole Tadgell's "No Mush Today"

This weekend, The NYU Institute of African American Affairs hosted the A is for Anansi Conference on Literature for Children of African Descent. It was a great conference and I was thrilled to be a part of it – it’s always exciting to be in a room full of people who care about books, kids, and social justice issues. A few of the highlights I caught:

Author and publisher Andrea Davis Pinkney started things off with a good news/bad news keynote, sharing a few reasons why some say we are in a “Golden Age of African American Children’s Literature” – a new generation of talented authors and illustrators, more award recognition, etc. – but also shared these dismal numbers that tell us that the number of books by/about people of color has not increased at all since 1994. 1994! In other words, we’ve got our work cut out for us.

I spoke next on a panel about publishing/selling literature about children of African descent. Just Us Books owner Cheryl Willis Hudson moderated, and agent and former bookseller Joe Monti started off with some anecdotes about the resistance big book buyers have to selling covers with people of color. Ultimately, he said, he doesn’t believe race really makes a difference in sales. “A good cover will sell books, and a bad one won’t,” he said.

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This Week in Diversity: Gender, Books, and Maps.

Welcome to another diversity-filled week!

As happens fairly regularly in the literary world, people have been talking about gender and books. Two different takes caught our eyes this week: The Book Bench at the New Yorker took an analytical look at the discussion with What We Talk About When We Talk About Men Not Reading, looking at both men’s reading and at the the publishing industry. Meanwhile, author Maureen Johnson took a personal look at the issue with Sell the Girls, in which she talks about how the vast majority of her assigned reading, in school and college, was by and about men.

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This Week in Diversity: More Colorful

Happy Friday! We begin this week with some progress on the publishing front: lots of conversations going on right now among booksellers about how to sell multicultural titles, especially to white readers. Check out this great post by Elizabeth Bluemle as well as a discussion by the fine folks at Random House. It’s heartening to see so many different kinds of book people—publishers, booksellers, and readers—assuming responsibility and making it their mission to support diversity.

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This Week in Diversity: In Between

Greetings on this fine Friday! We have a couple links for you this week, dealing with interactions and being between cultures or peoples.

First, the Times has a look at Anglo-Indian culture: a relic of colonialist times, composed of people of (usually partly) European origins living in India, blending Indian and British cultures while being part of neither. Anglo-Indians occupied a middle position in the racial hierarchy of colonial India, seen as inferior to people of entirely English descent and upbringing, but superior to the native Indians.

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New Voices Award FAQs

Note: The New Voices and New Visions writing contests are currently on a temporary hiatus. A follow-up announcement will come in 2024.

The New Voices Award is open to all authors of color and Native nations who have not previously had a children’s picture book published. The winner receives a cash prize of $2000 and our standard publication contract, including our basic advance and royalties for a first-time author. An Honor winner will receive a cash prize of $1000.

We periodically get some questions about the Award, so I’d like to answer a few of them if I can:

What does it mean to be a person of color?

Well, that can be a pretty complicated question, but for purposes of our New Voices Award specifically, we accept contest entries from people who self-identify as African, Asian/Pacific Islander, Latinx, Middle Eastern, or Native American/Indigenous descent.

Why is the New Voices Award only open to people of color?

The New Voices Award was founded to encourage and support authors of color in a market where they’ve been traditionally excluded and underrepresented. That was true in 2000 when the award was started and it’s still true today (see these stats for some surprising figures about the number of books published by/for people of color). The New Voices Award is one of the ways in which we’re trying to close the gap.

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