home again

London was lovely! I came home with yet another cold and I’m hacking as I write, but it was good to get out of the US for a while. I’m always struck by how easy London feels—I traveled all over the city and went to Coventry and Cambridge, and didn’t feel anxious or unsure; something about the design of the city really works for me, and that no doubt contributes to how happy I feel when I’m there. It also helped that I met wonderful educators who created opportunities for me to share my work with their students. I arrived Wednesday morning and stopped by the Museum of Natural History to say farewell to Dippy but the main hall was closed; got some soup and a cheese & pickle sandwich before heading back to the hotel to work on my law school talk. The next morning I went to East London to visit Ms. Russo’s class at the Petchey Academy—such wonderful young readers! I hustled back to the hotel and caught a train up to Coventry; it was great to meet such impressive Caribbean women lawyers and scholars, and our audience members were ready to debate the topic of cultural appropriation. I had a chance to sell some books afterward and then the conversation continued as we returned by train to London. I ordered a late night pizza and slept in the next day before heading up to Cambridge to hang out with Ana from The Book Smugglers. She gave me a tour of the historic colleges, and we talked about the intense labor and emotional energy that goes into publishing. Saturday was Open Day at the University of Roehampton and I received a warm welcome as soon as I arrived on campus. More books were sold and important connections were made before I dashed off to meet my friend Clare at the British Museum. I managed to see two more friends before heading to the airport on Sunday, and on the plane ride home I started composing the previous blog post calling for researchers around the world to track diversity in kid lit. I felt pretty awful on Monday because of this cold (and all the “issues” writing about Canada stirs up for me), so it was nice to get these colorful graphics from Matthew Smith at Reflection Press. Instead of looking at how many books we *don’t* have for Indigenous kids and kids of color, Maya and Matthew have calculated how many #ownvoices books we’d need to achieve parity:

Of course, this isn’t likely to happen within the traditional publishing industry since it’s dominated by straight, White, cis-gender women without disabilities. I’m a little worried that if other countries agree to track diversity in kid lit, they’ll continue to treat books for kids as if they organically appear rather than being carefully curated. We have to look at the lack of diversity in the entire children’s literature community—librarians, teachers, reviewers, booksellers, editors, marketers, authors & illustrators, and kid lit scholars…