My medical records show frequent headaches and joint pain from the time I was able to articulate being in pain. When I was seventeen, a neck injury left me with a constant headache and more than fifteen days of migraine each month. It wasn’t until about six months ago —...
In their March/April 2020 Horn Book article “We Need Diverse Jewish and Muslim Books: A Conversation,” Heidi Rabinowitz and Sadaf Siddique discussed the state of Jewish and Muslim books and the work being done to share them. They found a number of parallels in their approaches to showcasing Jewish and...
How many times recently have you had this conversation regarding a diverse book? “Now they’re banning _______!” “______? But that’s such a beautiful book! How could anyone ban it?” “Yeah, it makes no sense.” But that’s not true. It does make sense. And we have to admit it and understand...
Wade, Cheryl, Katura, and Stephan Hudson. Photo courtesy of Just Us Books. Wade Hudson: We are happy to be with you today at the 2022 Simmons Summer Institute in Children’s Literature. Big shout-outs to Cathryn Mercier and Shelley Isaacson of the Center for the Study of Children’s Literature and to...
At the Cooperative Children’s Book Center (CCBC), we know there is great interest in the statistics we release every year about diversity in children’s and young adult literature. From the very beginning of our work documenting aspects of diversity in books for youth, we’ve understood that the numbers are part...
It all started on Twitter. In April 2014, the fan convention BookCon announced a lineup of authors for a “blockbuster” panel — a panel that consisted of four white men. Frustrated by this news, authors Ellen Oh and Malinda Lo discussed the lack of representation across the children’s publishing industry...
It is with hugely mixed emotions that I announce the retirement of Martha V. Parravano as Book Review Editor on Friday, May 5, 2023. A longtime/lifelong (!) Horn Booker, she is known as "keeper of the Horn Book flame" (--Editor Emeritus Roger Sutton). Pause. For. Weeping. But now the very good news:...
We all know stories are powerful. And some themes and subject matter are evergreen: friendship is celebrated in Don Quixote as well as in the Frog and Toad books. Mating partners and social standing figure equally in Pride and Prejudice and the eleventh-century Japanese saga The Tale of Genji. “Widespread...