The Latino Book Awards and #WeNeedDiverseBooks

While perusing my Facebook Newsfeed the other night I came across this NBC News article about the 16th Annual Latino Book Awards, which was posted by one of the Library-related organizations I "follow."  The awards were started by Latino Literacy Now and Edward James Olmos to honor the work of Latino writers and promote sales and over 180 Latino/a authors gathered at the ALA conference in Las Vegas over the weekend for the award ceremony.  Author Meg Medina pointed out that "we know from 10 years of data that the needle has been stubbornly stuck at about 3 percent of all books being by or about Latinos."  But, their mission seems to be succeeding; this year there was drastic increase in book submissions (41%!) for the 87 categories, which reflects the growing market for books targeting Hispanics.  According the author of the article, Latinos will purchase over 500 million dollars worth of books in English and Spanish this year!

The article linked to the #WeNeedMoreDiverseBooks site, which prompted me to actually dig deeper into the campaign, which I had only scanned headlines about (also through Facebook!) before.  The campaign started in April of this year after bloggers Ellen Oh and Malinda Lo expressed their frustration through Twitter about the lack of diversity in children's lit, in particular the fact that BookCon had an all-male and all-white panel this year.  The campaign spread like viral wildfire through the social network world and an ongoing conversation about the value of multicultural children's books has been started across the Web.  Here are some interesting stats and statements I came across in my perusal of the associated sites:

• In 2013 there were 3,200 children's books published.  93 of them were about African Americans.
• As of June 2013, 37% of the US population was considered "multicultural" but only 10% of books published in the last 18 years had multicultural content.  Check out this infographic for more on those stats.
• According to UW-Madison's very own Kathleen Horner from the Cooperative Children’s Book Center (CCBC): "I think we saw the numbers of multicultural books flatlining when school and public libraries began to get funding cuts, so that publishers came to rely more on bookstores for sales. At around that time, we also saw the rise of Amazon, Borders, and B&N. I’ve heard many times from publishers that the “buyers at B&N” believe multicultural books don’t sell. When they are not stocked in these bookstores, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy."
• Children look for characters like themselves in books they read.  According to Rudine Sims Bishop, author of the 1990 article “Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Doors,” "When children cannot find themselves reflected in the books they read, or when the images they see are distorted, negative, or laughable, they learn a powerful lesson about how they are devalued in the society of which they are a part.” 

It seems like the campaign has served a great purpose already in just getting these discussions on the social media radar, which as we know in these networked times, can lead to important shifts in opinion.  Needless to say, I've now "liked" #WeNeedDiverseBooks on Facebook so I can keep following the conversation and the wealth of multicultural resources they provide!

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