Section
Children’s & YA Literature
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Digging up Whiteness
We may imagine that young people are innocent of the implications of race and class in American culture, that they can grow up in a kind of bubble of protection, safely insulated from the vexed and terrible realities of injustice. But young people know better. Children see race as a category before they learn to…
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We All Must Play “The Westing Game”
In the beginning was Sunset Towers. By which I mean, at the beginning of what I quickly came to think of as my reading life: whatever came before, whether read …
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Queer Your Own Adventure
“BEWARE and WARNING!” So heralds the front page of the Choose Your Own Adventure books, wildly popular in the 1980s and 1990s. “This book is …
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The YA Resistance
With tedious regularity, cultural commentators turn up their noses at Young Adult fiction, grumbling that it allows readers who should know better to indulge in “escapism, instant gratification, and nostalgia.”1 These complaints overlook the aesthetic inventiveness and political engagement evident in the work of contemporary YA authors such as Kristin Cashore, Daniel José Older, and…
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Coming of Age with Philip Pullman
People really like Philip Pullman’s characters. One of my best friends gave his daughter the middle name Lyra after Lyra Belacqua, the heroine of Pullman’s His …
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The 90-Second Newbery: An Interview with James Kennedy
“Trade and plum-cake forever, huzza!” So said John Newbery, the 18th-century …
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Empathy Is Not Enough
Almost 30 years ago, education researcher and children’s literature scholar Rudine Sims Bishop introduced an analogy that has been widely embraced by the librarians, teachers, artists, and scholars involved in the #weneeddiversebooks movement. Stories featuring underrepresented minorities, Bishop observed, can function as both mirrors and windows. Members of marginalized groups can see themselves represented as…
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Teaching Kids to Resist
Do you know who Fred Korematsu is? He is not yet a household name like Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King Jr., despite the integral role he played in protesting the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. That’s because the story of how he managed to wrest a formal apology from the United…
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Picturing Freedom
Freedom Over Me: Eleven Slaves, Their Lives and Dreams Brought to Life by Ashley Bryan enriches a fragmentary archive by tapping into something we know for sure about the enslaved but seldom allow ourselves to explore …
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Refugee Stories for Young Readers
Today, more than half of the world’s refugees are children under the age of 18. That’s nearly 50 million young people, making this the worst child refugee …
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The Mixed-Up Kids of Mrs. E. L. Konigsburg
Imagine that you are a children’s book editor. An unproven writer who has only recently sold her first story sends you her second effort. The manuscript opens with a rich old lady’s note to her lawyer; she is sending him a story, she explains, to help him understand why she wants to change her will.…
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Good Morning iPad: Technology in 21st-Century Picture Books
After teaching her class the “Star light, star bright” rhyme, my son’s preschool teacher invited each child to express a wish to be inscribed onto a paper star for them to decorate. Lousy with glitter, my son’s star read: “I wish I could play with electronics whenever I want.” From earliest toddlerhood, he had been…
