Official Tumblr of We Need Diverse Books

“’Anti-racism’ is a noun but urgency requires us to treat it as a verb, I say. It means taking your awareness and turning it into action. Into doing something concrete. And then to keep doing it.”

We Need Diverse Books social media manager JoAnn Yao wrote about the Atlanta shooting, growing up Asian in Georgia, & how both solidarity and joy can be found while drawing a cartography of self. See below for our resources on how to take action, stand against anti-Asian racism, and #StopAsianHate.

CW: Mention of Atlanta shooting. Full list of warnings at beginning of essay.

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Asian Books & Authors:

• Asian Author Alliance’s Kidlit Directory – “A Directory of Asian Kidlit Authors as a way to help others discover and amplify Asian voices and stories!”
• KiBooka – site by author Linda Sue Park that showcases kids’ books (picture, Middle Grade, and Young Adult) and their Korean American + Korean Diaspora authors
  

Asian-Owned Bookstores:

• Maomi Bookstore (Chamblee, GA)
• Femme Fire Books (Jacksonville, FL)
• Arkipelago Books (San Francisco, CA)
• Bel Canto Books (Long Beach, CA)
• Eastwind Books (Berkeley, CA)
• Giant Robot Store (Los Angeles, CA)
• A Good Used Book (Los Angeles, CA)
• The Lev (Los Angeles, CA)
• Philippine Expressions Bookstore (San Pedro, CA)
• Kinokuniya (Various)
  
• The Asian American Curriculum Project (San Mateo, CA) – proceeds from sales also support their nonprofit, which works to “bring a wide variety of Asian American curriculum materials to schools, libraries, and the general public.”

Atlanta-based AAPI Organizations:

• Asian Americans Advancing Justice – Atlanta – “the first and only nonprofit legal advocacy organization dedicated to protecting the civil rights of Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders (AANHPI) in Georgia and the Southeast.”
  
  
• Center for Pan Asian Community Services – “Established as the first and largest Asian and Pacific Islander health and human service agency in the Southeast region, CPACS has been providing its core groups of services to immigrant and refugee families in Georgia since 1980.”

Fundraisers & Action Items:

• Verified Atlanta shooting victim fundraisers
• GoFundMe-organized AAPI Community Fund
• Asian Americans Advancing Justice in Atlanta Fund for the victims and their families
• Anti-Asian Violence Resources – includes statistics, bystander trainings, mental health resources, and more

• Asian Americans, A PBS Documentary – “a five-hour film series that delivers a bold, fresh perspective on a history that matters today, more than ever… Told through intimate personal stories, the series will cast a new lens on U.S. history and the ongoing role that Asian Americans have played.”
  
  
• Stop AAPI Hate – nonprofit that tracks incidents of hate and discrimination against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the U.S.
  
  
• The Asian American Curriculum Project – “Our mission is to educate the public about the great diversity of the Asian American experience through book distribution, cultural awareness, and educating Asian Americans about their own heritage, thus instilling a sense of pride.”
  
  

(Source: diversebooks.org)

“Most people, however, do not know, or have failed to grasp, the horrid and racist details of wars that helped bring many Asians to this country. Our experiences, including those of Southeast Asian refugees, are rarely told or acknowledged. Instead, distant family members recount their refugee stories to one another, sharing harrowing narratives of escaping pirates at the sea or famine and starvation. These same communities have been and are facing detentions and deportations. Even in recent years, as mainstream society has begun to acknowledge the need to address white supremacy and systemic racism, Asians and Asian Americans are often left out of the conversation. As Dr. Mimi Kim, who works on community accountability and transformative justice, once said about the Korean War and its impacts: ‘The violence is also in the forgetting.’“

(Source: ELLE)

In case you missed it live: watch the recording of the 2021 Walter Awards on YouTube!

Congratulations to:

✨ Ibi Zoboi
✨ Dr. Yusef Salaam
✨ Robin Ha
✨ Traci Chee / @tracichee
✨ Victoria Jamieson
✨ Omar Mohamed
✨ Daniel Nayeri
✨ Kacen Callender

Many thanks to our co-host The Library of Congress, emcee Laurie Halse Anderson, moderator Deb Taylor, & sponsor BookBub!

For more on the winners and honorees, see our virtual program.

(Source: diversebooks.org)

minoritiesinpublishing:

“In 2019, Diana Ma and Angeline Boulley were part of the @weneeddiversebooks Mentorship Program, partnering with YA heavy hitters to craft their debut novels. Boulley’s Firekeeper’s Daughter is the story of a young Ojibwe woman who witnesses a murder and becomes an FBI informant on a new drug. Ma’s Heiress Apparently follows a Chinese American actress who travels to Beijing for a role and discovers long-concealed family secrets. Here, the authors discuss their writing challenges, their families’ reactions to their novels, and using the YA genre to underscore insights about identity and culture.“

Variations and dialects of spoken English, including what linguists refer to as African-American English, have been the subject of intensive study for years. But research on Black ASL, which differs considerably from American Sign Language, is decades behind, obscuring a major part of the history of sign language.

About 11 million Americans consider themselves deaf or hard of hearing, according to the Census Bureau’s 2011 American Community Survey, and Black people make up nearly 8 percent of that population. Carolyn McCaskill, founding director of the Center for Black Deaf Studies at Gallaudet University, a private university in Washington for the deaf and hard of hearing, estimates that about 50 percent of deaf Black people use Black ASL.

Now, young Black signers are celebrating the language on social media, exposing millions to the history of a dialect preserved by its users and enriched by their lived experiences.

(Source: The New York Times)

As Black History Month comes to a close, we reiterate that Black history is not static, limited purely to the past — it is made year-round. Here’s to the history-making Black creatives whom we’ve featured on the WNDB blog over the past year, along with some additional reading & resources.

(Source: diversebooks.org)

“Anti-racism work is all too often done as a performance—to be popular and look ‘woke.’ It can be painstakingly ornamental. It needs instead to embed community efforts, organizers, and the actual people who live with America’s oppression. It needs to make structural changes that dismantle centuries-old, racist institutions from the ground up in order to rebuild with a commitment to community, safety (without police), justice, diversity, and actual equity. For equity work to work, it must be handed to the community. We have to actually trust the people we say we want to empower to make structural changes, not just tinker at the edges of injustice.“