Asian-American Writers Take on Race

It's something we've been wondering about here at the CCBC for the past year or so, ever since we noted that our statistics reveal that fewer Asian-American book creators write and illustrate books about Asian characters than they do about white (or animal) characters.  With such a dearth of books with Asian main characters, why don't more Asian authors and illustrators create them?

In a year when we celebrated so much diversity in the ALA Award choices, it doesn't escape our attention that the three Asian-American authors and illustrators who were honored this year won for books that didn't feature any Asian characters. This year's Caldecott Medal winner by the prolific Thai-American artist, Dan Santat, is a case in point.  Beekle is about a raceless imaginary friend and, although the people he meets in the real world are diverse, the girl who eventually adopts him appears to be white. 

Jillian Tamaki won a Caldecott Honor for This One Summer, a realistic graphic novel that perfectly captures a summer friendship between two girls during the time when one is beginning to outgrow the other. Both the illustrator and the author are Japanese American, but the book, as far as I can tell, features an all-white cast. 

Interior from This One Summer

And author Anna Kang won the Geisel Award this year for You Are (Not) Small, a book with bear characters standing in for humans. In spite of the fact that the book has no human, let alone Asian, characters, the author talked about how the book was influenced by her own Korean-American heritage in her eloquent acceptance speech last month.  So who's to say if a book by an Asian-American author is Asian or not?

With all that in mind, we were pleased to see this eye-opening blog post by Zetta Elliott in which she asks several prominent Asian-American writers to discuss this issue. Their responses give us a lot of food for thought. 

The Numbers Are In

Every year around this time for the past 30 years, the CCBC has published the number of books by and about people of color. We started doing this in 1985 when our Director, Ginny Moore Kruse, was on the Coretta Scott King Award Committee and knew that there were only 18 books eligible for the award that year. We were so shocked at that number that we decided to document it in our annual publication, CCBC Choices.

That number got around. Most people knew there weren't many books being published by Black authors and illustrators; they just didn't know the number was that small.

The next year it was the same -- 18 again. After that, it almost doubled, and started going up a bit each year until it peaked in 1992. Since then it has plateaued.

Before too long we were being asked for the number of books by and about American Indians, Asians/Asian Pacific Americans, and Latinos, and we started keeping track of those numbers, too. CCBC librarian made a graph that shows the progress (or lack thereof) since 2002.

 Looking at this graph you can see what I mean when I say the numbers have plateaued. Some years the numbers go up, only to go down again the next year.

This year we saw an increase in the number of books about Africans and African Americans, Asians/Asian Pacific Americans, and Latinos. the number of books by and about American Indians increased by two. It'll be interesting to see if next year the lines on our graph continue rising upward.

In the meantime, you can look at the statistics on more detail on our website: Children's Book by and about People of Color Published in the United States.  This year for the first time, we've decided to post our list of the authors, illustrators, and titles we've documented. Just click on 2014 to find the link to the lists for African American and American Indian (The list of Asian and Latino books are coming soon.)

Over the next several weeks we'll be blogging about these statistics, discussing some of the questions and observations that have come up, and talking about how we collect our data. Please post any questions you have here.

Book of the Week

House of Purple Cedar

by Tim Tingle

Published by Cinco Puntos Press, 2014 (c2013)

336 pages

ISBN: pbk. 978–1–935955–24–5

Age 14 and older

In 1967, Rose is an old woman looking back on her childhood in Skullyville, Oklahoma, in 1897, in a novel that moves back and forth between Rose, her family and Choctaw community, and residents of the nearby town of Spiro. Among them is the marshall, a man who is despised by Choctaw and whites alike. His cruelty is often random, as when he strikes Amafo, Rose’s grandfather, at the train station one day. Amafo turns the other cheek, and in doing so finds allies among some of the whites in Spiro while leading his community away from confrontation. Tim Tingle writes beautifully and deeply about love and forgiveness as antidotes to violence and hatred in a novel that also doesn’t ignore hard realities. Sometimes bringing the truth into the light isn’t enough; sometimes you have to fight back with violence. This is illuminated not only through what happens to Rose and her community but also through the lives of several women in Spiro, one of them the marshall’s wife, who has endured his beatings for years. The power of family, of community and connection, and of love and compassion to transcend divides — among individuals, across cultures, between the living and the dead — is profound and hopeful in a story that is, above all, about the human heart. The tense plot unfolds through characters drawn with astonishing depth and subtlety, their actions and interactions richly revealing. Solace for Rose’s community is also found in both Christianity and in spiritual experiences imbedded in their culture, the two seamlessly reconciled in their lives.  © Cooperative Children's Book Center

Book of the Week

Tap Tap Boom Boom

by Elizabeth Bluemle

Illustrated by G. Brian Karas

Published by Candlewick Press, 2014

32 pages

ISBN: 978–0–7636-5696–6

Ages 3-7

“Sky grumbles. Rain tumbles. Big weather — you’d better … get under umbrella! BOOM BOOM.” A rainstorm in the big city on a summer day means the appearance of umbrellas, a mad dash for the subway, and a spontaneous, generous-spirited gathering belowground. “The storm above makes friends of strangers. We laugh under cover at thunder and danger.” The visual storytelling accompanying the narrative enables readers and listeners to follow a number of individuals as the storm breaks, booms, and eventually moves away. A delight to read aloud, there is ample opportunity for enthusiastic participation with the repetitive onomatopoeia, while the finely crafted rhyming phrases create a satisfying narrative arc. “We wave good-bye. ‘So long! Keep dry!’” Honor Book, 2015 Charlotte Zolotow Award  © Cooperative Children's Book Center

Book of the Week

Brown Girl Dreaming

by Jacqueline Woodson

Published by Nancy Paulsen Books / Penguin, 2014

336 pages

ISBN: 978–0–399-25251–8

Age 10 and older

“And somehow, one day, it’s just there / speckled black-and white, the paper / inside smelling like something I could fall right into, / live there — inside those clean white pages.” Jacqueline Woodson’s childhood unfolds in poems that beautifully reveal details of her early life and her slow but gradually certain understanding that words and stories and writing were essential to her. Her older sister was shining smart. One of her brothers could sing wonderfully. She would come to realize words were her smart, her singing, her special thing. Woodson writes about growing up in Greenville, South Carolina, and then Brooklyn, New York, living with family members who were full of love and expectation, from her grandparents to her mother to her siblings, aunts and uncles. She sometimes felt she stood out — a northerner in the south; a southerner in the north; a Jehovah Witness knocking on doors. Experiences that shaped her came from within and beyond her family: “Don’t wait for your school to teach you, my uncle says, / about the revolution. It’s happening in the streets. “ And later, “This moment, this here, this right now, is my teacher / saying / You’re a writer, as she holds the poem I am just beginning.” Ten poems titled “How to listen” reveal another essential element of her story because she is also that: a listener, a recorder, an observer, writing something down even when she doesn’t understand it and trusting that “The knowing will come.” An album of black-and-white photographs and an author’s note round out this exquisite, quietly inspiring volume.  © Cooperative Children's Book Center

Book of the Week

Rain Reign

by Martin Ann M.

Published by Feiwel & Friends, 2014

226 pages

ISBN: 978-0-312-64300-3

Ages 8-12

“This is how you tell a story: First you introduce the main character. I’m writing this story about me, so I am the main character.” Rose loves homonyms, prime numbers, and order. It’s important to her that everyone follow the rules. She lives with her dad, Wesley, whose name is not a homonym, and her dog, Rain, whose name is. When Rain disappears during a hurricane, Rose channels her worry into a methodical search with the help of her Uncle Weldon. But in finding Rain she learns that her beloved dog, which her dad brought home for her almost a year before, belongs to someone else. There is so much that is wonderful in this novel, starting with the narrative voice. Rose has Asperger’s and Ann M. Martin firmly and beautifully grounds this story in Rose’s point of view. The ways she engages with people is not always easy for others, including her dad, but Rose is always consistent and there is a clear logic to how she behaves. Her dad, meanwhile, is unstable, sometimes drinking too much, sometimes leaving Rose alone for much too long, sometimes losing control of his anger. Overwhelmed by his own past and the current reality, he falls far short of his intent to do well by Rose. Luckily, Weldon not only loves his niece but truly enjoys her, and as the story develops, Rose begins to make connections with a classmate at school, cultivating a friendship for the first time. A novel rich in every way — language, characterization, character development, plotting — is full of tension and small moments of humor, and packs a powerful emotional punch.  © Cooperative Children's Book Center

Sparky! by Jenny Offill Wins 2015 Charlotte Zolotow Award

Sparky!, written by Jenny Offill and illustrated by Chris Appelhans, is the winner of the eighteenth annual Charlotte Zolotow Award for outstanding writing in a picture book. The award is given by the Cooperative Children's Book Center (CCBC), a library of the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and will be presented in Madison this spring.

                Jenny Offill’s clever twist on the familiar “I Want a Pet” scenario gives an absurd premise masterfully understated treatment. The story begins with a girl's heavy lobbying for an animal companion, followed by a compromise from her mother: “You can have any pet you want as long as it doesn't need to be walked or bathed or fed.” A little research in the school library results in a match. “My sloth arrived by Express Mail.” The girl optimistically names him Sparky. “It was two days before I saw him awake.”  The marvelous humor is never overplayed as Offill skillfully maintains a measured, evenhanded tone and perfect pacing. The restrained narrative manages to be both outrageously funny and unexpectedly tender as the girl comes to appreciate Sparky for what he is, rather than what he is not. “I reached over and tagged him on the claw.  ‘You're it, Sparky,’ I said. And for a long, long time, he was.”  The muted illustrations perfectly echo the story’s tone.

Sparky! was edited by Anne Schwartz and published in the United States in 2014 by Schwartz & Wade Books, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books.

The 2015 Zolotow Award committee named five Honor Books:  

 Beautiful Moon: A Child’s Prayer, written by Tonya Bolden, illustrated by Eric Velasquez, edited by Howard Reeves, and published by Abrams Books for Young Readers;  

Chengdu Could Not, Would Not Fall Asleep, written and illustrated by Barney Saltzberg, edited by Kevin Lewis, and published by Disney-Hyperion, an imprint of Disney Book Group.

Ivan: The Remarkable True Story of the Shopping Mall Gorilla, written by Katherine Applegate, illustrated by G. Brian Karas, edited by Anne Hoppe, and published by Clarion Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Tap Tap Boom Boom, written by Elizabeth Bluemle, illustrated by G. Brian Karas, edited by Joan Powers, and published by Candlewick Press.

Water Rolls, Water Rises = El agua rueda, el agua sube, written by Pat Mora, Spanish translation by Adriana Domínguez and Pat Mora, illustrated by Meilo So, edited by Louise May, and published by Children’s Book Press, an imprint of Lee & Low Books.

               

 The 2015 Zolotow Award committee also cited nine titles as Highly Commended:  

•  Beneath the Sun written by Melissa Stewart and illustrated by Constance R. Bergum (Peachtree)
• Edgar’s Second Word written by Audrey Vernick and illustrated by Priscilla Burris (Clarion Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
• Go To Sleep, Little Farm written by Mary Lyn Ray and illustrated by Christopher Silas Neal (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) 
• Hooray for Hat! written and illustrated by Brian Won (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
• The Hula Hoopin’ Queen written by Thelma Lynne Godin and illustrated by Vanessa Brantley-Newton (Lee & Low Books)
• If You Were a Dog written by Jamie A. Swenson and illustrated by Chris Raschka (Farrar Straus Giroux, Macmillan Publishing Group)
• One Big Pair of Underwear written by Laura Gehl and illustrated by Tom Lichtenheld (Beach Lane Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster)
• Water Can Be… written by Laura Purdie Salas and illustrated by Violeta Dabija (Millbrook Press, Lerner Publishing Group)
• What Forest Knows written by George Ella Lyon and illustrated by August Hall (A Richard Jackson Book/Atheneum, an imprint of Simon & Schuster).

            

             Zolotow Award Press Release