New children's laureate Malorie Blackman (and why it matters)
(Coming out of lurkerdom to make a brief post on something important to me.)
Congratulations to Malorie Blackman, the new UK Children's Laureate! All the previous Laureates have done amazing work promoting children's books and reading, and I am thrilled to have a POC as the new incumbent.
And congratulations to Tariq Mehmood, the first non-white author to win the Diverse Voices Award.
Why are these two bits of news so important?
Well, a few years ago, when I was a school librarian, I made a wall display for Black History Month. I did different displays in the same spot pretty often and the kids passed them by. Not this one. Black and Asian students stopped to look at it and comment on what was included. They stopped to talk to me about it. They borrowed books that were included on the display. One student came to me thrilled and asked me to buy Roots because she'd heard about it from her family and the display made her think maybe she could get it from the library. She rarely borrowed books from the library up until then, but that started a voracious reading habit.
In the same school, I was running a book fair and dealing with the usual day-to-day business (keeping an eye on the easily pocketable stationery, mostly), when a student came running up to me looking THRILLED with a book. 'Miss, miss! Can I buy this! It's about me!' The student was British Asian. The book was Does My Head Look Big in This?. She came back to me the next day to tell me more about how meaningful the book had been to her, and to tell me about her own experiences.
Fast forward five years and I'm teaching a module on modern children's literature. The first time I created a reading list for the module, I looked down it and realised that every single author was white. When I made an active effort to think about writers of colour who I could use in place of some of those white authors, the list I came up with was depressingly short. Even more striking was the fact I could think of many African-American writers who would fit beautifully, but far fewer British ones. Malorie Blackman is a notable exception. I am pretty sure this is not because there are no great writers of colour in Britain.
Children's literature needs writers and characters of colour. Children like my students deserve to feel that moment of connection, that excitement of recognition. Even more, they deserve not to feel unbelievably thrilled when they see someone like them in a book, because it should be totally routine.
I've done a lot of work on children's publishing in the 1960s and 1970s. That was a time of MUCH more diversity in children's publishing. Lots of people were making the call for change. Somehow, though, we stopped paying attention. We slipped back to a 'default' where Britain's black and Asian writers got overlooked.
It's time to change. I hope Malorie Blackman's tenure as Children's Laureate will help to spark that change.
This entry was originally posted at http://zooey-glass.dreamwidth.org/111964.html. You can comment there using OpenID.
comments so far.
Congratulations to Malorie Blackman, the new UK Children's Laureate! All the previous Laureates have done amazing work promoting children's books and reading, and I am thrilled to have a POC as the new incumbent.
And congratulations to Tariq Mehmood, the first non-white author to win the Diverse Voices Award.
Why are these two bits of news so important?
Well, a few years ago, when I was a school librarian, I made a wall display for Black History Month. I did different displays in the same spot pretty often and the kids passed them by. Not this one. Black and Asian students stopped to look at it and comment on what was included. They stopped to talk to me about it. They borrowed books that were included on the display. One student came to me thrilled and asked me to buy Roots because she'd heard about it from her family and the display made her think maybe she could get it from the library. She rarely borrowed books from the library up until then, but that started a voracious reading habit.
In the same school, I was running a book fair and dealing with the usual day-to-day business (keeping an eye on the easily pocketable stationery, mostly), when a student came running up to me looking THRILLED with a book. 'Miss, miss! Can I buy this! It's about me!' The student was British Asian. The book was Does My Head Look Big in This?. She came back to me the next day to tell me more about how meaningful the book had been to her, and to tell me about her own experiences.
Fast forward five years and I'm teaching a module on modern children's literature. The first time I created a reading list for the module, I looked down it and realised that every single author was white. When I made an active effort to think about writers of colour who I could use in place of some of those white authors, the list I came up with was depressingly short. Even more striking was the fact I could think of many African-American writers who would fit beautifully, but far fewer British ones. Malorie Blackman is a notable exception. I am pretty sure this is not because there are no great writers of colour in Britain.
Children's literature needs writers and characters of colour. Children like my students deserve to feel that moment of connection, that excitement of recognition. Even more, they deserve not to feel unbelievably thrilled when they see someone like them in a book, because it should be totally routine.
I've done a lot of work on children's publishing in the 1960s and 1970s. That was a time of MUCH more diversity in children's publishing. Lots of people were making the call for change. Somehow, though, we stopped paying attention. We slipped back to a 'default' where Britain's black and Asian writers got overlooked.
It's time to change. I hope Malorie Blackman's tenure as Children's Laureate will help to spark that change.
This entry was originally posted at http://zooey-glass.dreamwidth.org/111964.html. You can comment there using OpenID.
comments so far.