caged kids

I have so many things to say but I need to think some more so this post will be brief. I flew out to San Francisco on Thursday and guzzled about three liters of water during the six-hour flight to ward off a cough attack. Today I’m hardly coughing at all, but over the weekend I just couldn’t stop. I’m not really sick—it’s my asthma that makes this cough linger, and it’s exhausting but the trip was still totally worthwhile. I stayed with Laura Atkins in her beautiful new home and we got to catch up with Janine Macbeth and Maya Gonzalez on Friday at the ACL institute. As soon as we arrived we were greeted and warmly welcomed by Meredith Steiner; Amy Cheney found me in the crowd and I was thrilled to spend Saturday morning with her at the Alameda County Juvenile Justice Center. So far this is the main connection I’ve made between the conference on Friday and my time at the detention center: kids should NOT be caged but that’s inevitably what happens when you put profits before people. The ACL institute was all about “going there” and unlike other diversity events, there was a workshop on white privilege that broke down some key terms (like the difference between equality and equity). I’m not sure PoC needed to be present for that lengthy workshop, but we definitely needed someone like Maya in the morning session to point out that the panel on privilege in publishing was continuing to uphold normative whiteness. I personally am not concerned about getting white kids to read my books. It’s great when they do, but my priority is getting books into the hands of kids of color. And one of my main objectives at Rosetta Press is to publish affordable, inclusive books so that low-income families can build a home library for their kids. But once again on the morning panel we heard the claim that diverse books have to be profitable because at the end of the day, the publishing industry is a business. Jacqueline Woodson made this remark and then added that she and her partner are careful about what their kids consume; over Xmas they only saw Selma and Annie, and Jackie bought 10 copies of The Crossover to share with friends. I’m reading it right now and will be sending a copy to my young cousin, but I can’t afford to buy ten hardcover copies of every diverse book. And even if The Crossover didn’t win the Newbery and didn’t land on the bestseller list, that book would STILL deserve to be in print and in the hands of young readers. During the panel Laura gave a shout out to indie authors like me and alternative presses like Maya’s Reflection Press and Janine’s Blood Orange Press; our success in telling different kinds of stories gives her hope, and I’m glad. But it’s troubling to me that so many people are still buying into the idea that profitability matters most. After the panel I was having a lively conversation with some women of color about why a capitalist publishing model is so problematic when a white woman librarian politely interrupted us to ask Janine if she could please publish some books about Samoans for her high school students. Her request helped me make my case. A book about Samoan teens may not wind up on the bestseller list and make a huge profit for some publisher. But the NEED for those books is real, and those Samoan kids deserve to see their lives reflected on the pages of the books they read. And yes, kids of other racial backgrounds could also benefit from reading those books. But if publishers continue to think that books about kids of color “don’t sell,” and if they produce hardcover books that are prohibitively expensive, and if they have lily-white marketing departments that don’t even TRY to market books to PoC, then nothing will change. During my visit to the detention center I was telling a group of teenage girls about The Last Bunny in Brooklyn. “It’s an allegory,” I told them, “a story that has a hidden meaning.” And one girl turned to me and said, “Like subtext?” And I wanted to say, “You don’t belong here.” But then none of them belongs in a windowless cell. The detention center has incredible art in their administrative offices—art produced by the incarcerated youth. There were yoga mats on the floor in the girls’ unit because instructors come in to teach them yoga. So what if we provided art classes and yoga to ALL kids from pre-K through to college? What if every school and community and home had a library filled with diverse books? What if every school received the same funding and had teachers who aren’t paid according to their students’ test scores? We can create communities that put people first. We can ensure that EVERY child has books that serve as a mirror. But we have to divest from the profit mentality that turns everything into a commodity. For-profit prisons have helped to drive mass incarceration, which has devastated low-income communities of color. We don’t need for-profit publishers to “save” our kids. We can serve them more effectively ourselves with a community-based publishing model.

It was such a treat to gather with like-minded individuals while I was on the west coast. I’d be lost without the support and guidance of my fellow “rad women.” When I got back to Brooklyn on Sunday, Amy connected me with a librarian at a juvenile detention center here in NYC. Hopefully I’ll be able to visit this spring and share my books. One girl in Alameda was removed from our small group but later told me she liked my book about the bird—I thought she meant Bird but then she talked about the kids being underground, and I realized she was talking about Ship of Souls. I’m so glad librarians like Amy are making sure that incarcerated youth have diverse books. ALL our kids matter; no child is disposable.

me, Laura Atkins, Maya Gonzalez, & Janine Macbeth