The Diversity Initiative Moves to CBC News
We’re excited to start sharing all our diversity focused content directly on CBCBooks.org. Book creator interviews, reading lists, article highlights, essays, and more will be shared regularly right here.
The CBC Diversity Initiative has been creating and highlight diverse content for many years on its Tumblr and all of that wonderful material is still available. Here are some of our favorites.
The #drawingdiversity series, which highlights favorite illustrations from representative reads:
This essay by author Sonia Patel:
Safe Diversity in YA Lit Isn’t Enough Diversity
While YA novels are increasingly diverse, safe diversity—with accessible and likable protagonists and their convenient struggles—is usually seen as enough. These unoffending books tend to be championed and more popular. Unsettling diversity, on the other hand, is often frowned upon, discounted, or misconceived.
I’m a practicing child and adolescent psychiatrist and a young adult novelist. To me, dismissing YA that’s outside the realm of palatable diversity is like a psychiatrist refusing to treat certain teen patients because they have “too many problems.”
And this Author Interview with T.R. Simon:
Candlewick Press sat down with T.R. Simon to discuss her new book ‘Zora and Me: The Cursed Ground’
CP: How do the maturing Carrie and Zora see the world differently as they approach their teens?
T.R.S: In book two of the Zora and Me trilogy, Zora and Carrie are now twelve going on thirteen. Although they are still children, they have encountered the sorrow of death along with the pride and joy that life in Eatonville affords them. What begins to alter them now is a slowly growing awareness of the past. While Eatonville could seem idyllic, tucked away from the daily brutality of the Jim Crow South, it is not free from the shadow of American history, particularly from the history of slavery. The history of slavery is a hard thing for young people because it requires them to confront the brutality of hate and the despair of powerlessness. Zora and Carrie grapple with the conflicted feelings that learning about Eatonville’s history brings up while simultaneously realizing that life is necessarily, for good and for bad, informed by the past.
