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Seeing Ourselves: Write to Preserve, Edit to Protect
Angeline Boulley as a high school senior. Photo courtesy of Angeline Boulley. The first time I read a story that featured a Native American protagonist, I was a high school senior. It was a significant experience for me. As an Ojibwe teen, I hadn’t realized my absence in books until...
Seeing Ourselves: Cherokee DNA Tree of Life: Our Syllabary
Illustration (c) 2023 by Jeff Edwards. The Cherokee language is what ultimately defines us uniquely as Cherokees. We are one of only a very small handful of Native American tribes who have a syllabic writing system. The Cherokee Syllabary was completed by Sequoyah in 1821. His Syllabary contains eighty-six individual...
Seeing Ourselves: The Mannequin of Charles Towne
Eden Royce at age six. Photo courtesy of Eden Royce. Every Saturday when I was a kid, my mother would take me to the mall. Mostly, it was her looking through racks without making a purchase and me fidgeting, desperate to be anywhere else. I found the stores boring, the...
Seeing Ourselves: Our Stories Could Fly: The Future of Books for Black Children
I own a well-read copy of Virginia Hamilton’s The People Could Fly: American Black Folktales. It’s a classic in many households, as it should be. It’s not just the stories that I return to over and over again; it’s the magical illustrations by the dynamic duo Leo and Diane Dillon....
Seeing Ourselves: QTBIPOC in Abundance
I’ve always said that my wish for diverse books in the future, especially for LGBTQIA+ books — and even more so for QTBIPOC books — is that there will be so many of them that people can walk into a bookstore looking for the most specific niche and still be...
Seeing Ourselves: All Books for All
My hope for the future of diverse children’s literature is that one day, the segregating qualifiers will fall away for good. When my daughter was eight, I remember the two of us combing the library stacks, searching for an appropriate middle-grade book. At some point, a sympathetic librarian asked if...
Seeing Ourselves: Stories Worthy of Being Told
In January 2022, when We Need Diverse Books’s Walter Awards Judging Committee informed me that Red, White, and Whole had won the Walter Award for younger readers, I burst into tears. It was such an incredible honor, one I had never dreamed a book of mine would win. Growing up...
Seeing Ourselves: Correcting the Landscape
My children have always known they are Cherokee, a fact they shared with classmates in Texas, the historic lands of the Lipan Apache, Comanche, Caddo, and others. The response was often, “You can’t be Indian; all the Indians are dead.” Aside from the impoliteness of non-Natives using the misnomer Indian...
Seeing Ourselves: When I Read
Illustration (c) 2023 by Janelle Washington. From the May/June 2023 special issue of The Horn Book Magazine: Diverse Books: Past, Present, and Future. Find more in the "Seeing Ourselves" series here....
Seeing Ourselves: Listen to the Kids
Christina Soontornvat on a school visit. Photo courtesy of Christina Soontornvat. When I do school visits, I always show a slide filled with covers of diverse fantasy and sci-fi. I love the reaction from the kids — they point and gasp and whisper to their friends about which ones they...
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