Zetta Elliott's Blog, page 118

loyalty & betrayal

Whoa…I just read something extraordinary: "We are not your weapons—we are women."  I found this article on the Crunk Feminist Collective's blog, and had to keep reading when the journalist admitted she was raped in Haiti after vowing to refute news reports that Haitian men were brutalizing women in that country.  Her impulse was to protect the image of "brothers" who are so often maligned…but how do you defend behavior that is indefensible?  I was already thinking about misplaced loyalty...

It's Earth Day!

Show DIRT some love today—without it, our planet and our future are lost…if you liked Food, Inc., then you need to see DIRT! The Movie…where else, but on PBS!

focus, people

Privilege is "tricksy," and so it's not always easy to identify just when and how it's operating.  If you want a recent example, stop by Debbie Reese's blog, American Indians in Children's Literature.  Debbie discovered a 2008 interview in which author Neil Gaiman made some rather careless remarks; he responded to her post, and admitted that he misspoke.  He didn't exactly apologize, but he made it clear that that was not what he intended to say.  We all fumble with words now and then, so I s...

guess what?

We just sold the foreign rights to Wish…in Turkey!  I suppose it's more accurate to say that Amazon's subrights agent made the deal, but the Turkish publisher did contact me first…we also heard from an agency in South Korea, but so far that hasn't panned out.  It's exciting, but also a little nerve-wracking—how do you know the translation's accurate?  What kind of cover will they design?  If publishers here in the US screw up covers, what are the chances they'll get it right overseas? ...

meet Adebe D.A.

Since April is National Poetry Month, it's fitting that I should introduce you to a fellow Canadian writer, Adebe D.A. Her first book of poetry, ex nihilo, comes out this month and she graciously agreed to share some of her insights and experiences with us.

1.  Tell us a little bit about your childhood, in particular the kind of books you read (at home and in school) and your family's attitude toward literature/storytelling/the arts.
Since I was a kid, I've been inspired by life as it...

get over it?

Today is the 15th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing.  I've already written about Timothy McVeigh on this blog (see my post on Teens & Terrorism), and over at The Huffington Post.  Tonight MSNBC is releasing taped interviews with McVeigh in which he insists, among other things, that parents and grandparents mourning the loss of their children ought to just "get over it."  Nineteen of the 168 victims were children…and yesterday former President Bill Clinton expressed the fear many of us ...

official pardon

One of the advantages of looking up Canadian books that feature black protagonists is that I found out about Viola Desmond—a Nova Scotian woman who dared to sit in the whites-only section of a movie theatre in 1946.  She was jailed and fined for "tax evasion," and died more than 40 years ago, but she recently received an official pardon from the province's black lieutenant-governor, Mayann Francis.  You can read more about the pardon and apology here.  I think it's interesting that Desmond...

be who you are

That's my mantra, generally.  I also keep this quote by e.e. cummings on my wall:

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best night and day to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle any human being can fight and never stop fighting.

Sometimes the battle isn't just against conformity, it's against pressure to serve as someone else's mascot—Neesha pointed me to this article in The Nation about Obama's decision to check "Black" on his census form. It's an o...

TBD

Even though it's marked on my calendar, I completely forgot that today was the Teen Book Drop!  For complete details, swing by readergirlz…and don't forget to "drop" a book somewhere in your community AND buy books to fulfill the wishes of Navajo and Apache students in Arizona and New Mexico.

give & get

There's a mega-giveaway going on over at Cleverly Inked—you could win one of several gift packs filled with YOUR choice of books and all kinds of swag…

There's also a fundraising effort underway by the Build the Dream team—if you'd like to support the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial in D.C., stop by their "micro-site" to learn more about all the ways you can help.