Essays

If you’re interested in reading more of my articles and guests posts on diversity in the children’s publishing industry, click on any of the links below.

• “Something Like an Open Letter to the Children’s Publishing Industry”
  (Fledgling; 9/5/09)
  
• “Some Preliminary Thoughts on Race and Reviews”
  (Justine Larbalestier’s blog; 2/18/10)
• “Breaking Down Doors: My Self-Publishing Story”                       (Huffington Post; 2/23/10)
• “Demanding Diversity in Publishing”                                               (Huffington Post; 2/26/10)
• “Decolonizing the Imagination”                                                                                 (Horn Book; March/April 2010)
• “Tackling Terrorism in Teen Lit“                                                                                                                          (Huffington Post; 3/10/10)
• “7 Tips for Self-Published Authors”                                                                                                             (Huffington Post; 3/16/10)
• “‘Ain’t They Black’: Negotiating Blackness and Borders in Canadian Young Adult Literature”                                                                               (Fledgling; 4/2/10)
• “Black Canadian children’s literature~the stats”                         (Fledgling; 4/5/10)
• “Numbers don’t lie—do they?”                                                                                     (Fledgling; 4/6/10)
• “Giving Up the Myth of Meritocracy”                                                                                                               (The Rejectionist; 5/3/10)
• “Diversity in YA Lit”                                                                                                (The Book Smugglers; 7/31/10)
• “A Storied Past”                                                                                               (School Library Journal; 2/1/11)
• “sister/outsider“                                                                                                     (Women Doing Literary Things; 3/22/11)
• “Unpacking the Past”                                                                                          (Hunger Mountain; 3/25/11)
• “Achieving Equity in Publishing“                                                                                (Fledgling; 5/6/11)
• “The Ethical Author” (Fledgling; 6/3/11)
• “Reflecting Reality” (DIPNET blog; 6/7/11)
• “The Bottom of the Pot: Blackness and Be/longing in A Wish After Midnight” (presented 6/23/11 at the Children’s Literature Association conference in Roanoke, VA)
• “Navigating the Great White North: Representing Blackness in Canadian Young Adult Literature“                                                                                                                    (The Centennial Reader; June 2011)
• “The Real Value of Free Books” (Behind the Book blog; 7/25/11)
• “Writing Children’s Books While Feminist and Black” (Ms. Magazine blog; 7/28/11)
• “Canada’s Black Writers: Achieving Excellence and Avoiding Annihilation” (Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences blog; 2/2/12)
• “Canada’s Black Writers: Achieving Excellence and Avoiding Annihilation” (reprinted in Sway Magazine; 2/21/12)
• “Trayvon–killed by an idea” (Huffington Post; 5/2/12)
• “Depicting Trauma in African American Picture Books” or “One Hot Mess” (presented 6/14/12 at the Children’s Literature Association conference in Boston, MA)
• “Farewell, Coretta” (Fledgling; 1/30/13)

My other scholarly essays may be found here:

• “The Trouble with Magic: Conjuring the Past in New York City Parks” to be published in the Summer 2013 issue of Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures.
• “Blackout in the Great White North: Responding to Racism & Erasure in the Canadian Children’s Publishing Industry” to be published in the 2013 issue of Sankofa: a Journal of African Children’s and Young Adult Literature.
• “‘If Rigor Is Our Dream’: The Re-Membering of Violence by Black Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance” published in the anthology, Imagining the Black Female Body, edited by Dr. Carol E. Henderson (Palgrave, December 2010).

• “Telling Secrets in the City: Narrative Possibility and the Urban Environment” published in Deep into Nature: Ecology, Environment and Children’s Literature edited by Jennifer Harding, Elizabeth Thiel, and Alison Waller (Pied Piper Publishing, UK; Fall 2009).

• “Writing the Black (W)hole: Facing the Feminist Void” , published in the January 2006 issue of thirdspace, an online feminist journal.

• “Writing the Unspoken, Framing the Unseen: Witnessing the Past in Contemporary Novels of Slavery,” WarpLand: a Journal of Black Literature and Ideas, Vol. 12, No. 1, 2005.

• “A Stranger in the Family,” Black Arts Quarterly, a publication of Stanford University’s Committee on Black Performing Arts, Winter 2005.