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Via Cynthia Leitich Smith: KT Horning has been interviewed by School Library Journal, a must-read for anyone interested in multicultural children's books.

When we looked at the Subject Guide to Children’s Books in Print for that year under “Blacks”—that was the subject—there was maybe a half-page of entries for nonfiction and fiction. But if you turned back a few pages and looked for “Bears” fiction, the entries went on for three pages. There were more children’s books with personified bears as main characters than there were with African Americans as main characters.

So we started keeping track of that statistic on a regular basis and printed it every year in CCBC Choices. After a few years, we reached a point where we would have people quote that number back to us, which was always kind of funny. Publishers would say, “Did you know, there were only 30 [multicultural] books [published] last year?” Yep. I agree with [Coretta Scott King Honor winner] Alexis De Veaux: buying a book is a political act. You have to buy books by authors of color so that there will be more books published.