For as long as I can remember, I have had three loves: jazz, poetry, and history. Those passions merged in my 2000 nonfiction title The Sound That Jazz Makes — a manuscript that was rejected more than a dozen times. The book’s first review was so negative that I cried. But then it won the Carter G. Woodson Book Award from National Council for the Social Studies — my first national honor. I had arrived!

Or so I thought. Subsequent pitches to editors and book reviews that I have received have confirmed for me how exclusive and subjective gatekeepers can be and how race figures into publishing outcomes.

This is evident even in rejection letters from publishers. My picture-book biography of African American stock car racing champion Wendell Scott, Racing Against the Odds, got multiple rejections. I was baffled until one editor replied — and I paraphrase — that NASCAR and African Americans are like oil and water; they don’t mix.

When I pitched my manuscript of Before John Was a Jazz Giant: A Song of John Coltrane, I was excited by an editor’s initial interest. Later, I notified her that I had an offer and, as a courtesy, invited a counteroffer. “I’m not familiar with his music.” She declined.

The most stinging rejection of all, though, dismissed my proposed subject as “a footnote to history.” From then on, I vowed to rescue Black stories from the footnotes and the margins.

For me, this work is political. So, I educate editors and teachers about my subjects’ significance and assure adults that children are not too tender for tough topics.

My books about systemic racism provoke questions among readers. “Who made that stupid rule?” a boy asked after reading Freedom on the Menu: The Greensboro Sit-ins. Another student’s question referred to African Americans as “colored,” a term that fell out of favor in the 1960s. Such inquiry sparks much-needed cross-generational and cross-cultural conversations. When adults provide access to BIPOC books and foster an anti-racist climate, critical literacy can come naturally for children.

So, imagine my disappointment when I discovered — after an unpaid, bookstore-arranged school visit before six hundred students — that the school’s library had just one of my fifty-some books. The librarian said that she couldn’t afford to buy everything. I hoped that she had at least bought books by my contemporaries or my predecessors.

The Black deans of nonfiction — James Haskins and Walter Dean Myers — have gone on. To continue their legacies, BIPOC creators like myself serve as ­mentors — through Kweli, We Need Diverse Books, the Highlights Foundation, or informally — to develop new BIPOC creators.

Yet, even as new BIPOC talent emerges and BIPOC subject matter gradually expands, white creators still get far more than their share of the market for nonfiction books about BIPOC. The business of equity remains unfinished and urgent.

The long-overdue #OwnVoices movement decries the historical omission, distortion, and appropriation of BIPOC narratives. But the movement has not deterred white creators from writing outside their culture, with permission or not.

My experiences are not anomalies, nor am I alone in this fight. I ally with other BIPOC nonfiction creators who center true stories that matter to our communities and to our country.

I asked some of my award-winning peers — a.k.a. my idols — to bear ­witness to the challenges, inequities, and opportunities that confront us ­individually and collectively. Their concerns ranged from the industry’s deficits in BIPOC representation and its discomfort with harsh historical truths to its dismal marketing expectations for BIPOC books. Here are some of their insights.

So much BIPOC history is little known, says Traci Sorell, author of the nonfiction picture book We Are Still Here!: Native American Truths Everyone Should Know. BIPOC narratives “are critical parts of our national identity,” she stresses, and “integral to our shared citizenry.”

Poet Nikki Grimes, whose latest work of nonfiction is the picture-book biography Kamala ­Harris: Rooted in Justice, adds, “We have so many stories that are difficult, that reflect cruelty, discrimination, and injustice. But they are stories that need to be told.” Grimes wonders, though, “How can we get across the message that we are all of equal value if our books are only marketed to the people of our own group?”

What’s needed, says Kelly Starling Lyons, whose most recent nonfiction title is the picture book Dream Builder: The Story of Architect Philip Freelon, is “a new understanding of history. ­African American history is American history. It’s not niche.”

“Having ­others determine the marketability of my history is troubling and underscores the need for better representation in all areas of publishing,” says Lesa Cline-Ransome, author of the ­historical fiction picture book Overground ­Railroad, among many other titles.

Underrepresentation puts an undue burden on BIPOC creators. “Having to offer up explanations…to those outside my culture,” says ­Cline-Ransome, “can feel like I am having to defend or justify my use of language or culture.”

Yet, as Sorell laments, “We continue to see white people getting published to share our stories, which read like they are written for other white people and not for young people from the communities represented.”

To make matters worse, white-authored BIPOC nonfiction can erode BIPOC creators’ opportunities. Don Tate, author-­illustrator, most recently, of William Still and His Freedom Stories: The Father of the Underground Railroad, found this out the hard way. In a common publishing scenario, one of his books was almost killed after a similar book beat his to press. “It especially hurt,” he said, “that the author of the other book was white. In a perfect world, the race of an author would not be a consideration. But we don’t live in a perfect publishing world.”

Far from it. The Census Bureau estimated that, in 2018, only about one half of the children in the U.S. and in America’s schools were white. Statistics show that the industry needs to catch up, says Sorell. “With publishing staff over eighty percent white, the industry is way behind where it must be to provide books that our young people need and want.”

Student access to BIPOC books is crucial, says Emma Otheguy, author of the bilingual picture-book biography ­Martí’s Song for Freedom / Martí y sus versos por la libertad. “Most children have books only if their public institutions buy them,” she states. “When school districts subtract book purchasing from their budgets, BIPOC kids, authors, and books are the first to lose out.”

And no one wins.

From the March/April 2021 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.