The #WeNeedDiverseBooks campaign is doing a great job of helping us (by which I mean children’s book professionals of all sorts) keep to the fore of our attention the need not just for books that articulate a multitude of experiences, but diverse creators to create them and diverse readers to read them. Two articles in the current issue of The Horn Book Magazine offer some signposts. In “Five Picture-Book Prodigies and the Difference They’ve Made,” Barbara Bader proposes that being gay just might have made all the difference to the work of five picture book masters: We need diverse artists. And in “Mind the Gaps: Books for All Young Readers,” author/librarian Vaunda Micheaux Nelson offers some very smart and practical thoughts about putting diversity into action in our libraries: We need diverse collections for diverse readers. And who are they? Everybody.



Roger Sutton,
Editor in Chief

From the March 2015 issue of Notes from the Horn Book.