For the past year or so, I've been meeting about once a month with a group of children's book editors from other houses. Founded by Nancy Mercado of Roaring Brook, we called ourselves DIBS (Diversity in Books), and we were hoping to help increase the diversity within the publishing industry, and also in the authors, illustrators, and books published. We started getting a website together and grand plans of doing school visits, job fairs, conferences, and more. But, of course, we were all so busy with our jobs and lives that it was hard to get things going. Well, a conversation at a Children's Book Council cocktail party brought these two groups together, and the CBC Diversity Committee was formed. We had a small kick-off party last week for agents, media, and publishing folks, and we talked about our mission, the importance of it, and what everyone there could do to become a CBC Diversity Partner. Here's a picture of me speaking:
Diversity is a mission I am absolutely passionate about--it's important not only for children to be able to see themselves represented in the books they read, but also important for children to be exposed to other experiences and viewpoints. It increases empathy and tolerance. And as I said at our kick-off, I hope to live in a world where we can have an Asian Harry Potter or a black Bella without anyone even blinking an eye. We'll get there, I know it!
Please, won't you all join us? I linked above to our mission and how we can all help, and we'll be keeping the CBC Diversity blog active with at least two posts each week. I'm posting this week, so stay tuned!
4 comments:
what a wonderful group to come together and endeavor. i look forward to future events and news!
Here at the Foundation for Children's Books in Boston, we're committed to bringing authors from diverse cultural and racial backgrounds, and authors who focus on questions of race and culture in their work, into under-served urban schools for visits and writing workshops. Just got back from our awesome visit by Mitali Perkins to a high school called Boston International whose student body is made up entirely of low-income immigrants. Cheers for looking at this issue in publishing and I echo your comments about the importance of finding stories that connect to your life and your story--I absolutely saw that in action today!
Alvina, it's a difficult thing to get an author and illustrator cultural mix as you will in the children's book world. When I was in school there were plenty of Asian kids, though I don't recall that many in the illustration dept. This is a choice of major. Not that many african american kids at RISD at all. Why? This is probably an economic factor. There were plenty of rich kids at risd. The school didn't give out that many scholarships. I was fortunate enough that my parents could afford to pay part (or more than) of my tuition thanks to savings, what my grandmother gave, etc. I do have college loans. To get more diversity in children's books you'd need to get more art schools to give out scholarships and then you'd need to get art schools to teach more children's book classes. It's a real up hill battle! If art schools paid enough I'd definitely teach a class or two...
If there was a fantastic box under this post, I would've clicked it!
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