I’m a white writer who is on a personal journey to develop my own awareness of race and to understand the complex world of issues around race in the creation of children’s literature. I write books about people in cultures…
Category: race
In the Footsteps of Crazy Horse
Guest Post by Linda Boyden Too often, history is written by the victors. Nowhere is this truer than in regards to the histories of the indigenous people of America, but Joseph Marshall III’s new middle grade novel, In the Footsteps…
Presenting Slavery in Picture Books: A Review of Poet: The Remarkable Story of George Moses Horton
The recent furor over two picture books with themes of slavery and cooking—Emily Jenkins and Sophie Blackall’s One Fine Dessert and Ramin Ganeshram and Vanessa Brantley-Newton’s A Birthday Cake for George Washington (which ended up being withdrawn by Scholastic last…
Review: All American Boys by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely
All American Boys by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely (Atheneum, 2015) takes place over the span of one week – the week after a white police officer brutally beats an African American teen boy. It’s told in alternating points of…
Interview With Author Shannon Gibney
Shannon Gibney‘s debut young adult novel See No Color (Carolrhoda Lab, November 2015) opens with a prologue. The six-year-old version of main character Alex Kirtridge is sitting on her father’s lap, obstensibly learning to fill out a score card for…
A Journey into the Past with Dayshaun’s Gift
Zetta Elliott’s City Kids series, which debuted in 2014 with The Phoenix on Barkley Street, features African-American characters who experience magic in their daily lives. After the phoenix helps Carlos and Tariq to restore their urban garden in Brooklyn and…
The Many Faces of Josephine Baker
In this multi-layered portrait of one of the most famous African-American performers of the 20th century for Chicago Review Press’s Women of Action series, Peggy Caravantes presents us with Josephine Baker: a flamboyant, difficult woman whose dream of integration and…
Frank Conversations About Race and Class: A Review of This Side of Home
Wherever it occurs, the process of gentrification inspires heated debate. On the one hand, new residents fix up crumbling buildings and bring new businesses to the neighborhood. On the other, these residents raise housing prices and displace longtime residents and…
New Shoes: “We’ll work for a nickel and a pair of outgrown shoes.”
The back of the picture book New Shoes shows a girl’s stockinged feet while she stands on a strip of brown paper. An adult, no-nonsense finger seems to pin the foot in place by its extension over the top of the…
My Three Best Friends and Me, Zulay-Guest Post by Kate Schatz
By Kate Schatz (author of Rad American Women A-Z) I’ve always been a careful curator of my kids’ bookshelves, stocking them with my own childhood favorites alongside treasured classics and new finds that I think are cool/smart/gorgeous/important/not lame/etc. But as…