Because it’s important to read about people who are different than yourself.
Because kids need to see themselves represented in literature.
Because all our stories are important.
Because children’s books can change the world.
Illustration from Josephine
For the past three weeks, we’ve been fully engrossed in our 5th annual Give Books campaign, that special time of year when we encourage everyone to give books during the holidays. For each pledge, we donate a book to a child in need through First Book, a nonprofit that sends new books to the schools and neighborhoods where they are needed most. Take the pledge today—our goal is to donate 30,000 books.
This Giving Tuesday, we want to shine the spotlight on another organization we hold near and dear to our hearts: We Need Diverse Books. They are a group of children’s book lovers that showcase and encourage literature that mirrors and honors the lives of all young people. To help get these stories into the classrooms that need them most, we’re proud to donate a selection of our diverse publishing to We Need Diverse Books:
One of their many noteworthy programs is WNDB in the Classroom, which works to share diverse literature and promote representation of children’s book creators from marginalized groups in school communities.
Illustration from The Quickest Kid in Clarksville
So how can you help? Here are a few ways:
Buy, read, and give diverse books—support authors and publishers who are promoting these stories and making an effort to distribute them worldwide.
Suggest diverse books for your child’s school library or for your public library.
Suggest authors and/or illustrators from underrepresented groups for school visits.
Illustration from Green is a Chile Pepper
Why do you think we need diverse books now more than ever?
The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are – until the poem – nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt. That distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births concept, as feeling births idea, as knowledge births (precedes) understanding.
As we learn to bear the intimacy of scrutiny and to flourish within it, as we learn to use the products of that scrutiny for power within our living, those fears which rule our lives and form our silences begin to lose their control over us.
Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” (from Sister Outsider)
