Greetings, people who read books!  Thanks to Oxford University Press, there is – this month – a Goodreads giveaway of my new book, Was the Cat in the Hat Black?: The Hidden Racism of Children’s Literature and the Need for Diverse Books. 10 copies will be given away. Important restriction: the books can only be sent…
So, as racism is on the rise, people seek examples of anti-racist thought to share. Â This is helpful! Â We need models from the past and present to guide us through these perilous times and (let us hope) towards a better future. Dr. Seuss is one of the people who is often quoted and shared. Â He’s…
quotation from Ruth Krauss’s A Hole Is to Dig (1952), on the L.A. Public Library. If she were alive today, you would be wishing Ruth Krauss a very happy 106th birthday. And yet Krauss was actually born 116 years ago, not 106 years ago. Look at the date in the upper-right-hand side of the document:…
Yes, I was there again.  Read on for Jeff Smith, Congressman John Lewis, Sonny Liew, Thi Bui, Brigitte Findakly, Lewis Trondheim, Jennifer Holm, and more! Cosplay This was my fourth Comic-Con.  So, each day, I walked past the city’s homeless, and past lines of fans waiting to get into I-don’t-know-what. (There are events outside of the San…
Good news: I’ve finished the Afterword and Notes for Crockett Johnson‘s Barnaby Volume Four: 1948-1949 (co-edited with Eric Reynolds, and coming next year from Fantagraphics)!  Revision to first sentence: we might put “finished” in quotation marks because there are a few references that stump me.  Perhaps you can help? At the back of each book, I…
The most powerful panel at last year’s Children’s Literature Association conference was “Needs of Minority Scholars,” featuring Sarah Park Dahlen, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, Laura M. Jiménez, and Marilisa Jiménez GarcÃa. If you are at the Children’s Literature Association conference right now, I encourage you to attend the follow-up session, “Beyond Diversity and Inclusion: Changing the…
Excited about unregulated firearms coming to Kansas State University’s campus? Â Well, be sure to thank Representative John Barker and Senator Jacob LaTurner. Â They refused to let the university campus-carry exemption bills even come up for a vote in the full House and Senate. So, thanks to them, the citizens who voted for them, and to…
During the past week, my six-year-old niece Emily has invited me to – and I have joined – many dance parties.  “Dance party!” she declares, and then goes to the CD player to put on one of the (dance) mixes I’ve made for her.  She then skips directly to her favorite songs, and dances only to…
In its new issue, The Horn Book joins the resistance. If the previous statement is a slight overstatement (and it is, because the magazine’s values have opposed those of Trumpism since before it acquired that name), it is only a slight overstatement.  The May-June 2017 issue includes at least four pieces critical of the current regime:…
Over on Public Books today, I have a new, short piece on Francesca Sanna’s The Journey, a.k.a. one of the best picture books published last year. If you have yet to read it, check out “Refugee Stories for Young Readers” (my essay), which includes some images from the book. In the piece, I observe that As Francesca Sanna’s…
