Daniel Handler has confirmed he’ll be sending a check for $110,000 on Monday.
Thank you all so much for spreading the word and donating (and donating again)! We believe so much in our mission to celebrate diversity and diverse artists in publishing and glad you believe in it too.
Our last and very special spotlight is on our WNDB Advisory Board Member Grace Lin. We are so grateful to have Grace on our Advisory Board and providing us with all her wonderful support and guidance.
Grace Lin is the author and illustrator of more than a dozen picture books, including “The Ugly Vegetables” and “Dim Sum for Everyone!” Grace’s 2010 Newbery Honor book Where The Mountain Meets the Moon was chosen for Al Roker’s Today Show Kid’s Book Club and was a NY Times Bestseller.
Ling & Ting, Grace’s first early reader, was honored with the Theodor Geisel Honor in 2011. An Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award nominee for the US, most of Grace’s books are about the Asian-American experience.
Grace is not only an extremely talented author and illustrator, but she is also an incredibly generous and wonderful person! She donated several of her beautiful prints to the Indiegogo campaign where they sold out in hours!
And Grace was also part of our WNDB Holiday Art project where she created this beautiful piece for us:
Our Indiegogo campaign is still running so please spread the word and help us make real change! igg.me/at/diversebooks
On Wednesday, We Need Diverse Books™ advisory board member Jacqueline Woodson—author of the marvelous Brown Girl Dreaming—was one of several authors honored with a National Book Award. As has been reported on various websites, host Daniel Handler made a number of racist remarks during that night, including regarding Jacqueline Woodson. Handler has since apologized and said:
My remarks on Wednesday night at #NBAwards were monstrously inappropriate and yes, racist. It would be heartbreaking for the #NBAwards conversation to focus on my behavior instead of great books. So can we do this? Let’s donate to #WeNeedDiverseBooks to #CelebrateJackie. I’m in for $10,000, and matching your money for 24 hours up to $100,000. Brown Girl Dreaming is an amazing novel and we need more voices like Jacqueline Woodson.
Many people on Twitter have urged Handler to donate to our fundraiser, and we’re glad to see this has had an effect. For twenty-four hours starting at 8AM EST on Friday, November 21, Handler is doubling donations—up to $100,000—made to the We Need Diverse Books™ campaign. If anyone has been intending to donate, we’d like to suggest they do it within this time frame to let their donation count double.
Among many other goals (detailed on the fundraiser page), we intend to use these donations to fund publishing internships for people from diverse backgrounds in an effort to diversify the publishing industry behind the scenes. We believe that’s an important step toward making the industry more welcoming to people of all backgrounds and prevent mistakes like Wednesday’s.
To center this conversation back on National Book Award winner Jacqueline Woodson and her astonishing accomplishment, we have added several special today-only #CelebrateJackie perks to our fundraiser. Donors can choose to receive signed books, including her most recent release Brown Girl Dreaming.
Please spread the word and #CelebrateJackie!
UPDATE: We’ve exceeded $50k in donations today! We have under twelve hours left to raise further money toward the $100k goal, so please keep spreading this post. We especially suggest writers to keep checking our IndieGoGo page, as we’re working on offering several new editor and agent critiques as perks.
Thanks to today’s generous donations, we've surpassed $150,000 and thus both our our campaign’s stretch goals. This brings us to our third stretch goal: sustainability.
The problem with diversity in children’s literature won’t be solved over night or even in a year. Battling entrenched barriers for diverse books takes sustained effort. Your donations from here on out, every single dollar, helps WNDB maintain our long-term viability and to continue to change the face of children’s literature for years to come.
Thank you so much for your support in the aftermath of this event.
Don Tate is WNDB’s Artist Outreach Coordinator and is the person who single-handedly brought together all these amazing illustrators for the WNDB Art projects. Today, we are thrilled to get to talk about our own resident artist!
Don is the illustrator of numerous critically acclaimed books for children including DUKE ELLINGTON’S NUTCRACKER SUITE (Charlesbridge), SHE LOVED BASEBALL (HarperCollins), and RON’S BIG MISSION (Penguin). Don’s illustrations also appear regularly in newspapers and magazines, and on products for children such as wallpaper, textiles, calendars, apparel, and paper products.
With a bold, dynamic style, Don’s oil and acrylic paintings bring to life the pages of the children’s books he illustrates. His art has been noted for it’s versatility of style, though Don does not feel his art represents any so-called trademark style.
IT JES’ HAPPENED: WHEN BILL TRAYLOR STARTED TO DRAW, illustrated by R. Gregory Christie, (Lee & Low Books, 2012) (ages 4-up) marks his debut as an author. It Jes’ Happened is a Lee & Low New Voices Honor winner, and an Ezra Jack Keats New Writer Honor winner, 2012. It received starred reviews from Kirkus, Booklist, and School Library Journal, as well as being selected as a Kirkus Best Children’s Books List Selection, a Booklist Editors’ Choice, 2012, and a New York Public Library Top 100 Titles for Reading and Sharing, and more! Also honored as a Bank Street College of Education Best Children’s Books of the Year, 2012.
And here’s Don’s beautiful piece for the WNDB Art Poster! For more information about Don and all his amazing work, go to his website at dontate.com. And don’t forget for a small donation, you can own the WNDB Art Poster with Don’s beautiful art! igg.me/at/diversebooks
Arree Chung makes picture books, but he did a lot of other things before finding his true passion. Arree began his career in consulting where he made lots of spreadsheets. Arree left the consulting field for an opportunity at Pixar. At Pixar, Arree learned the secret to success: loving what you do. To pursue his passion, Arree enrolled at the Art Center College of Design where he learned to draw, paint, and think differently. In Steven Turk’s Children’s Book Illustration class, Arree discovered his love for creating children’s picture books and the rest is history!
In the past decade, Arree has worked in the games industry as a Designer and Art Director. Arree’s first debut picture book, “Ninja!” hits shelves June 3rd, 2014. When Arree is not practicing his Ninja moves, you can find him playing basketball or riding his bike.
Here’s Aree’s awesome amazing Ninjafying art for the WNDB Art poster!
Diverse Kids DO need Diverse Books! Thank you Aree!
Since migrating to the US from Mexico in 1994, Yuyi Morales has created some of our most celebrated children’s books. She is a multiple winner of the Pura Belpré Medal, an honor bestowed by the American Library Association for Authors and Illustrators whose work best portrays, affirms, and celebrates the Latino cultural experience in an outstanding work of literature for children. Other honors include the Americas Award, the Golden Kite Medal, the Christopher Award, the Jane Adams Award, and the Tomas Rivera Award.
Born in Xalapa, the city of flowers and springs, Yuyi grew up among giant grandmothers, in a house with mossy walls, and abundant gardens. Eventually she enrolled at Universidad Veracruzana where she earned bachelor’s degrees in Physical Education and Psychology and then worked as a swimming coach until she immigrated to the US with her fiancé and their newborn son.
As a Spanish-speaking immigrant and new mother, Yuyi struggled with English and with loneliness in a culture foreign to her. She took solace in public libraries, where she and her son practiced English by reading children’s books. In her library visits she found a renewed interest for stories, and Yuyi enrolled in evening writing classes to learn how to tell stories in English like the ones she now so much admired. She also bought her first set of paints and brushes, and studying the picture books she loved she began to paint.
In 1998, along with a handful of writers, Yuyi founded the Revisionaries writers group, and became part of a community that would support her goal to pursue a career in children’s books. In 2000, she won the SCBWI Don Freeman grant for her work as a promising illustrator, and shortly afterwards she illustrated her first picture book for the school market, written by Isabel Campoy, titled Todas las Buenas Manos.
In 2003 her illustrations for Harvesting Hope, the Story of Cesar Chavez, written by Kathleen Krull and published by HMH Books for Young Readers, garnered much acclaim , and were awarded the first of four ALSC Pura Belpré Honors, as well as a Christopher and a Jane Adams Award, these last two in recognition of the causes of peace, social justice, and the higher human spirit. The book is also available in Spanish as Cosechando esperanza: La historia de César Chávez. Yuyi then wrote and illustrated, Just a Minute; A Trickster Tale and Counting Book, published by Chronicle Books, earning her The Americas Award, a Tomas Rivera Award, and her first of four Pura Belpré Medals. Next came Los Gatos Black on Halloween, written by Marisa Montes and published by Henry Holt and Co., which also won the Pura Belpré award for illustration. In 2007, she published Little Night /Nochecita (Neal Porter Books/ Roaring Brook Press), which won the Golden Kite Medal and Just in Case ((Neal Porter Books/Roaring Brook Press) which won a Pura Belpré Award for illustration and Honor for narrative. My Abuelita, by Tony Johnston (HMH Books for Young Readers) won her a Pura Belpré Honor for illustration. In 2009, she illustrated Ladder to the Moon (Candlewick Press) written by Maya Soteoero Ng, sister of President Obama, Yuyi’s first book to reach the New York Times Best Sellers List. Yuyi’s most recent book, Niño Wrestles the World (Neal Porter Books / Roaring Brook Press) makes her the first author/illustrator to have won the Pura Belpré Award four times and has reinforced her reputation as one of our leading children’s book creators.
Today, Yuyi’s little son has grown up and enrolled as an undergraduate at Sarah Lawrence College. She continues creating children’s books for children, divides her time between the San Francisco Bay Area and her home town of Xalapa, Veracruz.Mexico.
And here’s the beautiful art Yuyi did for the WNDB Art Poster!
Isn’t it gorgeous? You can own a copy of the beautiful WNDB Art poster if you donate to the Indiegogo campaign.
When Dav Pilkey was a kid, his teachers thought he was disruptive, “behaviorally challenged,” and in serious need of a major attitude adjustment.
When he wasn’t writing sentences in the detention room, he could usually be found sitting at his private desk out in the hallway. There he spent his time writing and drawing his own original comic books about a superhero named Captain Underpants.
Dav’s teachers told him, “You’d better straighten up, young man, because you can’t spend the rest of your life making silly books.”
Dav was not a very good listener!
But seriously…
Dav Pilkey has written and illustrated several popular award-winning books for children. THE ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN UNDERPANTS, which has nearly one million copies in print, was an American Bookseller Pick of the Lists and a Publishers Weekly “Cuffie” Award winner for the Funniest Book of the Year; DOG BREATH was awarded the California Young Reader Medal; THE PAPERBOY was chosen as a Caldecott Honor Book. Mr. Pilkey also illustrated the IRA-CBC Children’s Choice Award-winning Dumb Bunnies books. Dav Pilkey and his dog live in Oregon.
Here’s Dav’s fabulous #supportWNDB art for the WNDB Art Poster! Dav is a huge supporter of diversity and WNDB and he has also graciously agreed to sign 5 copies of this original print for our Indiegogo campaign. Only 3 are left! So if you are a Captain Underpants fan, don't miss this opportunity!
Hyewon Yum is the creator of four previous picture books: Last Night, a Fiction Honorable Mention for the Bologna Ragazzi Award and winner of the Golden Kite Award for Picture Book Illustration; There Are No Scary Wolves, winner of the Society of Illustrators’ Founder’s Award; The Twins’ Blanket, a Junior Library Guild selection; and Mom, It’s My First Day of Kindergarten!, a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year. Hyewon Yum also received the Ezra Jack Keats New Illustrator Award for Mom, It’s My First Day of Kindergarten!
Hyewon studied fine art and printmaking in Korea when she discovered the amazing world of picture books and illustration. She decided to be an illustrator, and came to New York and got her MFA from School of Visual Arts. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Here’s the adorable art Hyewon was so kind and generous enough to give WNDB for our Indiegogo Campaign. It is part of our beautiful WNDB Art Poster. For more information on Hyewon and her amazing art, please go to her website www.hyewonyum.com
Why I Support WNDB
Debbie Reese
American Indians in Children’s Literature.
For literally hundreds of years Native or Indigenous peoples of the America’s have been misrepresented in children’s books. Comenius’s Orbis Pictus, published in 1657, and widely regarded as the first picture book for children, portrayed us as devil worshippers.
Fast-forward 200 years to Mark Twain. In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, you’ll find “Injun devil” or, 300 years to Laura Ingalls Wilder. In her much-celebrated Little House on the Prairie, she misrepresents Native people, too, showing them as primitive and as such, undeserving of the land they were living on in Indian Territory.
Sprinkled amongst those derogatory depictions are the romantic ones. Take, for example, Brother Eagle Sister Sky, illustrated by Susan Jeffers. It is supposed to be the speech of Chief Seattle, but the text she used was that of a speechwriter in the 1970s, and, the illustrations show clothing and cultural artifacts of Plains Indians rather than of the Suquamish. There is a present-day Caucasian family in the book, and here and there, ghost-like Plains people are included.
Comenius, Twain, Wilder, and Jeffers all have points of view that were shaped by their education and their socialization as outsiders to the Native people they portray in their books. In them, Native people are villains and heroes, firmly confined to the past. Though I doubt Comenius’s book is used much by children today, Twain, Wilder, and Jeffers remain on best selling lists. That means generations of Native children continue to endure such misrepresentations, and non-Native children are misinformed about who we are, and who we were.
I’m a champion of We Need Diverse Books because it is committed to supporting Native writers and illustrators whose books can do two very important things:
(1) Studies show that Native children drop out of school in alarming numbers. Native scholars posit that Native children disengage in school because they don’t see themselves reflected in the curriculum. I think those numbers could change if Native children had more books about Native people, written by Native people. Such books function as a mirror, but being written or illustrated by Native people, they give the child a “possible self.” That’s a term that is similar to role model, but that takes into consideration, developmental and social contexts.
(2) These books can counter the misinformation that continues to circulate in the Americas and, indeed, around the world. Equipped with accurate depictions of who we are, non-Native students can be allies in and out of the classroom, helping us counter all that misinformation.
In short, it isn’t enough to support Native writers. We have to actively counter misinformation, too. Join me, please, in supporting We Need Diverse Books. Our voices matter. Our books are out there. Buy them. Read them. Gift them.
David Diaz at the Mazza MuseumCC BY-SA 3.0
David Diaz has illustrated numerous award-winning books for children, including Eve Bunting’s Going Home; as well as Newbery Honor-winner, The Wanderer, by Sharon Creech. Mr. Diaz was awarded the Caldecott Medal in 1995 for his work in Smoky Night by Eve Bunting, and his colorful illustrations in Margaret Wise Brown’s The Little Scarecrow Boy lead to the book being named the New York Times Best Illustrated Book for 1998. Most recently, Mr. Diaz has teamed up with renowned author Joyce Carol Thomas, creating vibrant illustrations for The Gospel Cinderella, a soulful retelling of the classic Cinderella story.
In addition to his career in children’s books, Mr. Diaz has been an illustrator and graphic designer for more than twenty-five years. His bold, stylized work has appeared in editorials for national publications such as The New York Times, Washington Post, Business Week and The Atlantic Monthly.
And speaking of bold, stylized work, his art piece for WNDB is just that - a beautiful, powerful, bold and stylized work of brilliance.
This beautiful art is part of the WNDB Holiday Art Poster and Holiday Notecard set.
Ken will tell you he was born on an ice floe and raised by a clan of penguins who read to him every night from the works of Margret & H.A. Rey, William Joyce, and DC Comics.
He’ll also say that he learned to paint by throwing his food at the walls. In reality he was born in Los Angeles and studied illustration at Art Center, College of Design. He has storyboarded for various commercials and animated TV shows such as The PJs and Futurama. His illustration work has been recognized numerous times by the Society of Children’s Book Writers & Illustrators (SCBWI).
In 2012, the first picture book he illustrated, Hot, Hot Roti For Dada-Ji, received the Picture Book Honor Award for Literature from the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association (APALA).
These days, you will find Ken illustrating, storyboarding, writing, and dreaming up stories for children.
You can see more of Kens beautiful art on his website http://kenminart.com/
Divya Srinivasan is an illustrator and animation living in Austin, Texas. Her clients include New Yorker magazine, Weird Al Yankovic, Sundance Channel, This American Life, Sufjan Stevens, and They Might Be Giants. Her picture books, Little Owl’s Night and Octopus Alone, are published by Viking Children’s Books, as is her newest book, Little Owl’s Day.
Look at her incredible piece for the WNDB Art Poster!
Divya’s art is beautiful and her website is so child friendly with fun extras like this incredible downloadable mini-poster:
This poster is brilliant. I can stare at it all day long!
You can view more of Divya’s work at www.pupae.com
Jarrett J. Krosoczka has been passionate about storytelling through words and pictures since he was a kid. He began his professional career by illustrating educational readers for a national publisher while still an undergraduate at Rhode Island School of Design. Then, just six months after graduation, Jarrett received his first contract for a trade book that he authored. Knopf Books for Young Readers published Good Night, Monkey Boy on June 12, 2001 and Jarrett hasn’t stopped or slowed down since.
Jarrett is a two-time winner of the Children’s Choice Book Award for the Third to Fourth Grade Book of the Year and is the author and/or illustrator of more than twenty-five books for young readers. His work includes several picture books, the Lunch Lady graphic novels and Platypus Police Squad middle-grade novel series.
Jarrett has given two TED Talks, both of which have been curated to the main page of TED.com and have collectively acrued more than a million views online. He is also the host of The Book Report with JJK on SiriusXM’s Kids Place Live, a weekly segment celebrating books, authors and reading. His work has been featured on the front page of The Boston Globe and on NPR’s All Things Considered. Jarrett’s books have also been recommended by national publications such as Newsweek, The New York Times and USA Today.
His Punk Farm picture book and Lunch Lady series are both currently in development as feature films. Jarrett lives in Western Massachusetts with his wife, two daughters and their pug—Ralph Macchio. To learn more about how amazing Jarrett is, check out his website http://www.studiojjk.com/
This gorgeous art piece by Jarrett is part of our WNDB Art Poster.
Not only is Jarrett incredibly talented and super nice! But he is also a huge supporter of We Need Diverse Books and is a fabulous person who has generously offered to donate the original signed art piece to our WNDB Indiegogo campaign. One really lucky person is going to have an original art piece by Jarrett Krosoczka!!
You are all made out of awesome for showing that you #SupportWNDB. This is mikejung’s thank you for bringing us across the $50K threshold!
If you haven’t had a chance to donate yet, there are still some amazing perks!
http://igg.me/at/diversebooks
AG FORD is a New York Times Bestselling Children’s book Illustrator and recipient of two NAACP Image Awards. He grew up in Dallas, Texas with his Mom, Dad, two sisters and one brother. He started to draw and quickly understood his ability to recreate what he saw with a pencil and paper. Ford went on to attend The Columbus College of Art and Design majoring in illustration. He is now a freelance illustrator, mainly for children’s books and has illustrated picture books for Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Sharon Robinson, Ilyasah Shabazz, Jonah Winter, Martin Luther King III, Nick Cannon, The Archbishop Desmond Tutu and many others. Mr. Ford lives in Frisco, Tx with his lovely wife Brandy.
The wonderful and generous AG Ford created this beautiful piece for WNDB’s Holiday Art poster and notecards:
It’s so gorgeous! See the full notecards up on our campaign page here.
And what’s more, because it is Halloween, AG let us share his spectacular Halloween art with all of you today!
If this art isn’t the best Halloween art around, then I’ll eat all my children’s Halloween candy in one sitting.
For more information about AG and his incredible art, please check out his website at www.agfordillustration.com
And Happy Halloween!!!