Articles & Opinion
Last summer I had the opportunity to visit the Kerlan Collection at the University of Minnesota, one of the largest archives housing materials related to children’s literature. Amid the sketches, dummies, early manuscripts and correspondences, and many other related paper ephemera and objects, what especially drew my interest was a...
I’m fond of reminding people that Greek mythology isn’t a compendium of dead narratives about long-dead people and distant places, pulled from a dusty old book or scroll. What we now call Greek mythology is what remains of a past culture’s most sacred beliefs — a collection of living stories,...
While I was an active writer in the 1970s and 1980s, I was invited to speak to children in many elementary schools around the country. Most of the students, in the third to sixth grades, were white. The children were interested in my work and the images that were all...
In a 2020 essay called “The Pandemic Is a Portal,” novelist and activist Arundhati Roy wrote, Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can...
Writing sequels or companion books to my novels has never been tempting to me, probably because I like to think each book accomplished all I’d intended to say. After completing When Zachary Beaver Came to Town (1999), I felt satisfied that I’d finished the story of Toby, Cal, and Zachary....
The mere mention of the n-word is usually cause for conversation and consternation, to put it mildly. Whenever used in a song lyric or a piece of literature, dialogue and debate are quick to follow. Even so, the n-word is a brick wall I occasionally crash into, on purpose, whenever...
“I will not write another lament.” That’s the first line of my poem “Room to Breathe,” which I wrote on May 29, 2020, the day a White Minneapolis police officer was charged with the murder of George Floyd. When the COVID-19 pandemic began, I turned to poetry, since I couldn’t...
As a writer who is identifiable as “diverse” (I’m a South Asian Indian woman) and who has fought for diversity in our industry for over a decade, I’m often asked to offer an opinion about whether a specific book got a diversity-related issue “right.” While it’s easy for me to...
KidLitWomen* was co-founded by Grace Lin and Karen Blumenthal in March 2018, with the mission of “calling attention to the gender inequities of our industry, uplifting the women who have not received their due, and finding solutions to reach equality.” The following article expands on a KidLitWomen* social media post...
25 articles
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