Ellen Oh is cofounder and president of We Need Diverse Books (WNDB) and author of the YA fantasy trilogy the Prophecy series and the middle-grade novel The Spirit Hunters, to be published in fall 2017. She was named one of Publishers Weekly’s Notable People of 2014. Ellen met Walter Dean Myers and his son Christopher Myers at one of her first book festivals. Already nervous, her mouth dropped open when she saw the pair towering over the crowd. Chris took pity on an awestruck Ellen and introduced himself, and he and Walter couldn’t have been nicer, taking her under their wing and treating her like an old friend. Oh resides in Bethesda, Maryland, with her husband and three children. Discover more at ellenoh.com.
Tim Tingle is a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and the author of Crossing Bok Chitto and How I Became a Ghost, both winners of the American Indian Youth Literature Award. Raised in a highly athletic family, Tingle chose the basketball path. He kept journals of his off-court experiences in the late 1960s, as a starting point guard on an integrated college team, in a staunchly segregated community. When a friend gave him a copy of Walter Dean Myers’s Hoops ten years later, Tim knew his own family’s struggles, as Indians in modern America, could no longer be ignored. His latest YA novel, House of Purple Cedar, won the AIYL Award. Tim lives on the shores of Canyon Lake, Texas, and can be found online at timtingle.com.
Jacqueline Woodson is the author of the National Book Award winner Brown Girl Dreaming, four Newbery Honor books, three National Book Award finalists, a Coretta Scott King Award winner, and four Coretta Scott King Honor books. She received the Margaret A. Edwards Award for her contributions to young adult literature and is serving a two-year term as Young People’s Poet Laureate. Her many award-winning novels include Locomotion, After Tupac and D Foster, Beneath a Meth Moon, Each Kindness, Feathers, and Miracle’s Boys. She lives with her partner and two children in Brooklyn, New York. Find Jacqueline online at jacquelinewoodson.com.
About We Need Diverse Books
“Reading is not optional.” This was Walter Dean Myers’s platform when he served as the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature from 2013 to 2014. He said, “You can’t do well in life if you don’t read well.” But Myers also believed that young people needed to see themselves reflected in the pages of the books they read. The goal of reaching out to these children through his books would become his life’s work.
In his New York Times op-ed piece in November 1986, “Children’s Books; I Actually Thought We Would Revolutionize the Industry,” he wrote, “If we continue to make black children nonpersons by excluding them from books and by degrading the black experience, and if we continue to neglect white children by not exposing them to any aspect of other racial and ethnic experiences in a meaningful way, we will have a next racial crisis.” More than twenty-five years later, he was dismayed to learn that according to a survey by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center (CCBC), only 7.5 percent of the 3,600 children’s book titles published in 2012 were about people of color.
On March 15, 2014, a month before the official launch of the We Need Diverse Books campaign, Christopher Myers and Walter Dean Myers wrote op-ed pieces for the New York Times. In “The Apartheid of Children’s Literature,” Chris wrote, “[Today’s kids] see books less as mirrors and more as maps. They are indeed searching for their place in the world, but they are also deciding where they want to go. They create, through the stories they’re given, an atlas of their world, of their relationships to others, of their possible destinations….It’s necessary to provide for boys and girls…a more expansive landscape upon which to dream.”
In Walter’s article “Where Are the People of Color in Children’s Books?” he ended his appeal for more diversity with the urgent statement, “There is work to be done.” This became the impetus for the We Need Diverse Books campaign, a rallying cry that brought advocates together from across the country, and around the world. The #WeNeedDiverseBooks hashtag went viral on social media platforms as people shared how important diversity was to them.
The idea behind We Need Diverse Books is not a new one—diversity advocates have championed the need for diverse books in children’s literature for decades, and although the conversation continues beyond our reach, We Need Diverse Books is grateful to be a part of this important movement. We create diversity initiatives in children’s literature, sponsor internships and writers’ grants, and administer the Walter Award, given to the teen novel that most embodies diversity and the work of Walter Dean Myers. And now, with this anthology, WNDB is honored to have ten talented authors join in the collaboration. For it is through notable partnerships like these that ideas take flight.