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Today we welcome Caroline Tung Richmond to the blog. She is co-editor, along with Elsie Chapman, of Hungry Hearts: 13 Tales of Food and Love. Caroline kindly answers questions about editing an anthology, writing, sloths, and of course food.

Publisher summary: A shy teenager attempts to express how she really feels through the confections she makes at her family’s pasteleria. A tourist from Montenegro desperately seeks a magic soup dumpling that could cure his fear of death. An aspiring chef realizes that butter and soul are the key ingredients to win a cooking competition that could win him the money to save his mother’s life.

Welcome to Hungry Hearts Row, where the answers to most of life’s hard questions are kneaded, rolled, baked. Where a typical greeting is, “Have you had anything to eat?” Where magic and food and love are sometimes one and the same.

Told in interconnected short stories, Hungry Hearts explores the many meanings food can take on beyond mere nourishment. It can symbolize love and despair, family and culture, belonging and home.

I adore books featuring food. On a scale of 1 to 10, how hungry will we get while we’re reading Hungry Hearts?

I’m hoping for a 10! My mouth was definitely watering every time I edited the stories in this collection, and I would inevitably curse at myself that I couldn’t sample the dishes I was reading about. So I’d recommend going out to eat right after you’ve finished Hungry Hearts – or better yet, read it while you’re eating!

What brought you and Elsie Chapman together for this project?

Twitter, actually! Elsie and I started chatting on Twitter years ago, and our friendship has grown via social media and emails. Back in 2017, I was tweeting about The Joy Luck Club and how I’d love to read more books that include its themes – food, culture, family, and the tension between immigrant parents and their first-generation children. Elsie contacted me shortly thereafter to see if I’d be interested in co-editing an anthology around these ideas, and I said OF COURSE!

We spent about a month and a half refining the concept, drafting the proposal, and revising it with our agents before we went on submission. Much to our surprise and delight, the book sold quickly – which was both wonderful and a tad stressful because I was nine months pregnant at the time! I believe we received the offer from Simon Pulse right before I delivered my son, and then we accepted it when he was about a week old.

Have you edited an anthology before? What are some of the challenges and rewards?

This is my very first time editing an anthology! Thankfully, Elsie has done this before (she co-edited the fabulous A Thousand Beginnings and Endings with Ellen Oh) and so she helped me navigate the learning curve. I also got wonderful advice from my friend Jessica Spotswood who has edited multiple anthologies, like Toil & Trouble and A Tyranny of Petticoats, which I contributed a short to.

My main challenge was dealing with taxes – I hate paperwork and crunching numbers so no surprise there! I’d recommend consulting with an accountant if you’re putting together an anthology since the taxes can get a bit complicated. But aside from that, Hungry Hearts was truly a joy from start to finish. I adored working with such talented writers, and I also loved working with Elsie and our editor Jen to shape the anthology as a whole. Usually writing a book is a very isolating process for me, and so it was refreshing to work on a project that required a lot of collaboration.

Is there a specific food you associate with family and/or love?

Oh, definitely! When I was growing up, my family would visit my paternal grandmother on Sunday evenings (we call her Nai-nai) and she’d make us dinner. My favorite dish of hers has always been her lion’s head meatballs. I have no idea why they’re called that – and they’re made out of pork, not lion, haha – but it’s a Shanghai dish and that’s where my grandma grew up.

My Nai-nai’s meatballs were always moist and perfectly seasoned, and she’d simmer them over a bed of Napa cabbage leaves and rice noodles that would soak up the yummy flavors. We’d serve everything over hot rice, and just thinking about it makes my mouth water and brings me back to my grandma’s little apartment. Nainai is now 96 and doesn’t cook anymore, and one of my biggest regrets is not asking her to teach me how to make those meatballs. I’ve made a couple recipes I found online, but they just aren’t the same. But I’ll keep trying!

Beyond this tempting collection, are there other young adult books you would recommend for our readers?

I’ve been reading a lot of adult fiction and non-fiction recently so I’m sadly behind on YA, but I’m really looking forward to checking out With the Fire on High by Elizabeth Acevedo because it’s about an aspiring chef and I love stories about food. I’m also excited to read Maurene Goo’s Somewhere Only We Know because it sounds like a delightful rom-com of a novel – and it’s set in Hong Kong! I’m hoping there’s a scene or two that features dimsum because I live for dimsum. (Turnip cakes might sound bleh, but they are SO GOOD and I could eat a plate of them right now!)

If you’re allowed to tell us, what other projects are you working on?

Hungry Hearts is my first stab at contemporary literature and so it’s a bit of a departure from my novels, which have all been historical fiction. My next book is a Cold War alternate history that’s set in Washington, D.C. and that features super advanced robots. No title yet, but it should come out in 2020 from Scholastic!

This last question is fairly random and has nothing to do with the book, but on your blog I saw a photo of you holding a sloth. How did that come about? Sloths are amazingly adorable.

Aw, I’m so happy you asked! I love sloths, and back in 2012 I was lucky to spend a week volunteering at a sloth sanctuary in Costa Rica, which took care of orphaned and injured sloths. I spent my time there cleaning out the sloth enclosures, prepping food for them (chopping up carrots and sweet potatoes and the like), and playing with the babies (best job ever!). My favorite sloth was a little guy named Linus who was super sleepy and just wanted to be held all the time. I wish I could’ve taken him home.

We always appreciate hearing from book creators and look forward to reading Hungry Hearts now that it’s out in the world.

Caroline Tung Richmond is the award-winning author of The Only Thing to Fear, The Darkest Hour, and Live In Infamy; and the co-editor of Hungry Hearts. She’s also the Program Director of We Need Diverse Books, a non-profit that promotes diversity in children’s literature. Caroline lives with her family in Frederick, MD.

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Book Review: Black Enough: Stories of Being Young & Black in America

Title: Black Enough: Stories of Being Young & Black in America

Author: Edited by Ibi Zoboi

Genres:  Short Story Anthology

Pages: 416

Publisher: Balzer + Bray

Review Copy: Purchased

Availability: Available now

Summary: Edited by National Book Award finalist Ibi Zoboi, and featuring some of the most acclaimed bestselling Black authors writing for teens today—Black Enough is an essential collection of captivating stories about what it’s like to be young and Black in America.

Black is…sisters navigating their relationship at summer camp in Portland, Oregon, as written by Renée Watson.

Black is…three friends walking back from the community pool talking about nothing and everything, in a story by Jason Reynolds.

Black is…Nic Stone’s high-class beauty dating a boy her momma would never approve of.

Black is…two girls kissing in Justina Ireland’s story set in Maryland.

Black is urban and rural, wealthy and poor, mixed race, immigrants, and more—because there are countless ways to be Black enough.

Review: I love that YA publishing is creating more and more short story anthologies, especially themed anthologies that focus on the diverse lives of marginalized voices. When Black Enough was announced I was so excited because I would have loved an anthology like this when I was a teen and I’m excited that the young people I’m around, specifically my Black students, will be able to see themselves in an anthology that all about their voices. I can honestly say that I loved absolutely every story in this anthology. Teen K. Imani was seen in the variety of the stories and I know this anthology will be a beautiful mirror for a number of Black teens.

If there was a common theme that could be expressed in this anthology, it is of teens finding their voice; be it standing up for themselves, their community, standing up to their parents, teachers, etc. In a number of the stories, the teens were finding their truth and deciding to act on it in a way that was unique to them. In Lamar Giles, “Black.Nerd.Problems.,” his character, who is a self-proclaimed nerd, finds his voice and speaks to his crush. In “Warning: Color May Fade” by Leah Henderson, her character fights back against a cultural appropriation by creating a better art piece and standing tall for her artwork.  Jay Coles’s “Wild Horses, Wild Hearts” was a wonderful “Romeo & Juliet” type of story of two young men whose parents hate each other (one family is White supremacists) but stand up for their relationship to both parents. It is both a middle finger to racism and homophobia.

Brandy Colbert’s “Oreo” really had an impact on me as I grew up in a private school setting where I was often the only Black girl, and there was tension when I was around other Black kids because I was influenced by my surroundings. In fact, Varian Johnson’s “Black Enough” touches on some the same issues that many Black teens who grow up in primarily white communities experience - the tension of living between two worlds. It is an experience I don’t often see in YA literature, so I was extremely happy to see these two stories express so vividly an experience many Black teens face.  

While teens may not see themselves in every story, they will see themselves in a lot of the stories. There is no one way to be Black in America and I feel like this anthology truly captures the Black experience. This anthology will also serve as a perfect window to the diverse lives of Black Americans and open people’s eyes to what it really means to be a Black teen in 2019.