stories heal

My first newsletter of 2016 is ready to go out (read it here), and I’ve got two new picture books to share with readers. I had the illustrations from A Hand to Hold with me in London and shared them with a friend—she got a bit weepy and said her husband probably couldn’t read the book with their daughter because he’d start crying, too! It’s hard to let go of your child and stand back while s/he engages with the world alone. I used to love holding my father’s hand but my dad moved out after the divorce and so I learned at age 8 what it meant to rely on myself. When I moved to NYC at age 21, I was amused when my father would reach for my hand before we crossed the street. In his mind, I was still a little girl and he didn’t believe I could navigate the city on my own. Now that he’s gone, I often wish I could see his “blinking” hand—he never said, “Take my hand.” He’d just “blink” his hand, open/closed, open/closed, until I slipped my hand inside. My father wasn’t really there for me the way the father in the book is there for his daughter, but I consider A Hand to Hold a tribute to my dad just the same…

Troy Johnson at AALBC gave me the opportunity to write a guest post for his blog: “Who Will Write a Story for the Children of Eric Garner?” In my essay I ask whether “white books” are as toxic to Black children as white dolls:

Think of the doll test developed by psychologists Mamie and Kenneth Clark in the 1940s. Eventually used in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case, the Drs. Clark intended the experiment to prove “the influence of race and color and status on the self-esteem of children.” In 2005, teen filmmaker Kiri Davis recreated the doll test in her short film A Girl Like Me. It’s heartbreaking to watch Black children reaching without hesitation for the white doll when asked, “Which is the nice doll?” and then faltering when asked to point out the doll that looks like them (“the bad doll”). What would happen if we conducted a similar test with books instead of dolls—would the results be the same?

Several YA authors have been discussing this on Facebook so we may take it to Twitter—stay tuned!