ONE DAY until we announce Walter Award winners and honorees! Did you know you can watch past Walter ceremonies? Check them out at their individual pages here.
(Source: diversebooks.org)
A non-profit and a
Only TWO DAYS until we announce Walter Award winners and honorees! Check out winners from past ceremonies like Jason Reynolds’ Long Way Down here.
(Source: diversebooks.org)
Writing Stories For Refuge, Home & Social Justice: A Conversation With YA Novelist Mitali Perkins
“Her latest novel, You Bring the Distant Near (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) is a multi-generational story of the girls in a Bengali family struggling to find identity and acceptance in the United States (via Ghana and the U.K), and was inspired by her own experience as the youngest of three sisters who arrived in America with a wave of immigrants in the 1970s. Its prose is lush, and as in all of Perkins’ previous novels, it crosses borders of geography, time and culture.“
WNDB Summer Reading Series
If you liked Rainbow Rowell’s FANGIRL read Mitali Perkins’ SECRET KEEPER because both feature sisters, missing parents, and life-changing, difficult decisions. Read more about SECRET KEEPER at the Smithsonian BookDragon.
We Need Diverse Books: How to Prepare to Write a Diverse Book
How to do research for your diverse book, by @iwgregorio #SupportWNDB - agent critiques at https://igg.me/at/diversebooks! With shout-out to malindalo @mitaliperkins
Love diversity in your fiction? Support We Need Diverse Books’ Indiegogo campaign!
Throughout October, we’ve partnered with We Need Diverse Books to bring you a series of blog posts full of helpful advice, tips, and suggestions for writing diversity convincingly and respectfully in your fiction—from people who know what they’re talking about. Today, I. W. Gregorio shows you exactly how to prepare to write a diverse book:
So you wanna write a diverse book? Awesome. Great diverse books can change lives. But as Spider-Man taught us: “With great power there must also come great responsibility.”
In her previous post, Ellen Oh quoted the brilliant Gene Luen Yang, who laid down the gospel:
“Make sure you do your homework.”
You can work on this homework at any point in the process, but I personally find it helpful to do it in the earliest stages. Because everybody needs help with their homework sometime, I’ve got five resources for writers researching a diverse book (or any book, for that matter):
Asian American Children's Author Series
This past summer Amitha Knight hosted 16 Asian American children’s book authors on her blog and asked them about their writing (including #WeNeedDiverseBooks team member Mike Jung).
So many great quotes and helpful advice from authors speaking to how important books are to them. Great interview(s) Amitha!