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[owlectomy]

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.

Comments

[takumashii.livejournal.com]

Yeah. And one of the reason the awards are important is that awards are HUGE for influencing whether libraries buy the book. Because picture books are so expensive, it's often hard for individual parents to justify the price if they're not rich -- your kids write in them or rip them up, they outgrow them. So, if you're a working-class parent, maybe you've got a dozen picture books at home, and maybe you're checking out a dozen from the library every couple of weeks. But before the awards -- your demographic would be virtually invisible to the publishers, because you're buying only a small number of books directly, and even if you're talking to your librarian asking for more books about kids of your ethnic background, they can't do anything to influence what the publishers put out.