Demand Diversity at Midwinter

"Hi, I'm a middle school librarian, and I'm especially looking for fiction with multi-ethnic characters to share with my students."

Really, it wasn't a trick question. I wasn't a plant. Actually I was thrilled, beyond measure, to be at ALA Annual for the first time. I was over the moon as I walked around the exhibit floor, brushing past famous authors at every turn (Sarah Dessen! Sherman Alexie! Jacqueline Woodson! Laurie Halse Anderson! For a book lover, it was like being at the Academy Awards). And I wanted to bring something back to the 1000+ students in my diverse urban public school, so when I stopped at publisher booths I asked, "Could you please show me some books with multi-ethnic characters to share with my students?"

My request was greeted with polite puzzlement. Mildly frantic hunting around the booth. Offers of good middle-school titles about white main characters. The answer I remember most clearly came from the Penguin employee who thought hard for a moment, then said brightly, "What about NONfiction!" and presented me with an advance copy of Marching for Freedom.

I was pleased to have an ARC for Marching for Freedom. I purchased Marching for Freedom for my school library. But oh, what a disappointing response to my question.

Colleen Mondor's post Demand Diversity in Publishing is very timely, as ALA Midwinter begins this weekend. I hope ALA members and visitors will read my post, and hers, and start conversations on the exhibit floor. Every publisher will have at least one book to offer. Ask for more.

Look for some of the new books like Eighth-Grade Superzero (Arthur A. Levine/Scholastic) and One Crazy Summer (Amistad/HarperCollins). Then demand MORE.

***
At ALA Annual I went to a YALSA session called Strengthen Your YA Collection with Small Press/Diverse Publishers. I also looked for diverse publishers on the exhibit floor. Since Annual I've gotten some great book recommendations and resources from the e-newsletters, websites, and Twitter posts of these publishers. Take a look.

Pinata Books/Arte Publico Press (@artepublico)
Brown Barn Books
Cinco Puntos Press
Curbstone Press
Just Us Books
Lee & Low Books (@leeandlow)
Rolling Hills Press

Harlequin is not a small publisher, but I want to mention that they highlighted diverse books for teens at Annual with the Kimani TRU imprint.

Updating to add more publishers:
Charlesbridge Publishing
Groundwood Books
First Second Books (guess they're not a small publisher, but a photo on Fuse #8 from Midwinter reminded me how great they are and that they publish ethnically diverse graphic novels)
Tu Publishing (new, first books coming in 2010)

ALA round-up

I am about to leave for Granny Burton's house, the only place in my life without Internet, so a full report will have to wait until next week.

My weekend at ALA Annual in Chicago was amazing, filled with books, authors, and editors, plus great learning about ALA itself and best practices for working with my students.

Best celebrity author moment: watching Sherman Alexie and Laurie Halse Anderson bump into each other and start chatting, three feet from me, as I lingered by the wall before the Newbery banquet.

Best non-celebrity author moment: learning that the quiet librarian sitting next to me during YA author speed-dating was herself a YA author who had just published Serendipity Market with HarperCollins this spring.

Some great conference reports posted this week:

I was delighted with Tasha Saecker's post about her conference because, while our themes are similar, she attended an entirely different roster of events than I did. That's how big this conference is!

Conference report from Publishers Weekly, and photos

Scholastic authors brunch, which I attended directly after YALSA's YA Authors Coffee Klatch (what a morning that was!)

Two reports on the Newbery/Caldecott/Wilder banquet. I was there.

More to come!

(And again, credit to the Baker & Taylor/YALSA grant that enabled me to have this incredibly memorable experience. I can't say enough about how fabulously I was treated by all the members and staff of YALSA who I met this weekend.)

ALA Sanity Break

I'm sitting outside the exhibit hall at ALA in Chicago. It's hard to believe that yesterday I worked a full shift at my job as a registered nurse--just as yesterday evening, when I got on the train to Chicago, I had a hard time thinking about books.

I started the day by heading straight to Scholastic for an ARC of Catching Fire, as did many others. I hadn't heard much about whether there actually would BE ARCs, but I already turned one down that someone offered me a few weeks ago, saying "give it to someone else, I'll pick one up at ALA". Yes, they were there! I feel like the last blogger ever to have one, but I'm satisfied.

Since then, I have:

--made Richard Peck laugh (and I'm pretty sure it was at me, not with me; I told him about how I visited Madame Tussaud's to see where Blossom and Alexander posed in the Titanic exhibit, and he said "You believe everything you read, don't you?")

--accosted Elizabeth Bunce, Yuyi Morales, and Garret Freymann-Wehr as they were just walking along, trying to look at stuff themselves

--talked with Roger Sutton about, of all things, The Long Winter

--almost cried talking to Candace Fleming about The Lincolns

--really started to cry when thinking about what I would say to Margo Lanagan about Tender Morsels; luckily for her, she's not appearing until Monday, after I leave, because yeah, there would have been tears

--tried to convince a rep to sell me her display copy of Lincoln: A Photobiography so I could get it autographed by Russell Freedman (they'd sold out--she wouldn't; I bought the Marian Anderson book instead, and I'm sure it's great, but pooh)

--gotten totally tongue-tied when trying to speak to Kadir Nelson, whose gaze is more compelling than should be allowable under the law.

I also collected other ARCs (and bought books too--no one told me many of the publishers would be selling brand-new current books cheap!), and shortly after the Kadir Nelson incident, decided to mail almost everything home. I held onto Catching Fire for the train ride, and I mailed the copies I had autographed for my mother and brother of We Are the Ship and A Year Down Yonder. (The first for my mother and the second for my brother, which is interesting.) I thought I looked at every ARC I took very carefully to make sure it was REALLY something I wanted--but when I was unpacking my backpack, I discovered that most of them I didn't ever remember picking up. I was pleased to get the new Alvin Ho book, and the rep handed me another one that she said I would like too, about a boy in Hawaii. It was a special thrill to see my brother-in-law Matthew's book, Hungry Monkey, at the Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt booth.

Then I headed out to take a break, but had no more than turned on this computer before my sister Laurie called. She wanted to go to a session; did I want to take her place in the Simon and Schuster line so I could have a brownie and meet M.T. Anderson, among others? Um, yes. Simon and Schuster was passing out plain old BOOKS. Piles of Chains and Wintergirls were seized quickly, but I picked up several others that looked good. My backpack is starting to feel heavy again.

Oh, and I've seen many friends old and new--I waved at Nina Lindsay, had lunch with child-lit people including Cheryl Klein, Monica Edinger, Anastasia Suen and Lyn Miller-Lachmann, talked briefly with two Betsy-Tacy friends (there will be a large, jolly Betsy-Tacy lunch tomorrow), and said a quick "happy birthday" to Abby the Librarian. I was bummed to miss Liz Burns due to a schedule misprint, and I'm still hoping to run into her and Betsy Bird. Anyone else around?

Anticipation

This year, thanks to a Baker & Taylor/YALSA grant and a calendar that puts Annual in July, I am going to the ALA Annual Conference! The stars have aligned to give me not just a great professional experience for a school librarian, but also an opportunity I never imagined as I studied the Newbery Award poster that hung in my elementary school library.

Since it's Wendy who actually read all the Newbery winners, I have promised her a full report from the banquet and will share it here as well. I am very excited, as well, about attending the Printz Award Program. While the Newbery is the award of my childhood, the Printz began when I was an adult working in a bookstore, and the Printz books have been fantastic over the years. This year's winner, Jellicoe Road, is not an easy book, nor can it have been an easy choice for the award, but... WOW.

(I considered also writing a post about Nicholas Kristof's column, but fortunately I can now point you to this response from Lisa Von Drasek at Early Word. "Hoary old favorites" is right. The only thing I will add is that if you did not already know that Kristof grew up in Oregon, the bizarre inclusion of On to Oregon on his list would tip you off. I loved pioneer stories when I was a kid too, Nick, but I don't go around recommending Tree Wagon to kids today.)