try, try again

For the month of May you can get 100 titles on Amazon for $3.99 or less! And I’m happy to announce that Ship of Souls is included in this great promotion. I did three school presentations today, and a librarian at one school held up her copy of SoS and asked, “Is this a true story? It feels so real!” She also said she’ll never see Prospect Park the same way now that she’s read about the nether beings…

Jen Doll has followed up her all-white list of greatest girl characters in YA with another article on “The Ongoing Problem of Race in YA.” I sent her an email after the first piece ran, and others must have shared their concerns as well because she did her homework this time:

It is a sad truth that each girl in my recent list of “The Greatest Girl Characters of All Time” are white. It shouldn’t be that way—but those are the books most of us of a certain age (and class and race) read growing up. The black characters we did get in our books were often peripheral, or were caricatures—or possibly, made to stand as a statement, to educate, to teach a diversity lesson. The latter is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is a bad thing if it’s the only way races other than white are portrayed, and continues to be so.

My own essay on the relationship between the murder of Trayvon Martin and racism in children’s publishing is now up on The Huffington Post. Visit your local bookstore and see how many books YOU can find that feature a black male protagonist…