Essays

If you’re interested in reading more of my articles and guests posts on diversity in the children’s publishing industry, click on any of the links below. Interviews can be found under the ABOUT tab.

My other scholarly essays may be found here:

  • “Opening Up Space for Global Black Girls: A Dialogue between Gabrielle Civil and Zetta Elliott (Departures In Critical Qualitative Research Special Issue: Saving Our Lives, Hear Our Truths:Exploring the Theory, Praxis, and Creativity of Black Girlhood Studies; forthcoming)
  • “I Am Not Beyoncé,” to be published in the Summer 2017 issue of Children and Libraries: The Journal of the Association for Library Service to Children
  • “‘All Land Is One Land Under the Sea’: Mapping Memory in Canada and the Caribbean,” published in the Spring 2014 Caribbean Quarterly.
  • “The Trouble with Magic: Conjuring the Past in New York City Parks,” published in the Winter 2013 issue of Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures. Winner of the 2014 Children’s Literature Association’s Article Award.
  • “Blackout in the Great White North: Responding to Racism & Erasure in the Canadian Children’s Publishing Industry,” published in the 2013 issue of Sankofa: a Journal of African Children’s and Young Adult Literature.
  • “‘If Rigor Is Our Dream’: The Re-Membering of Violence by Black Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance,” published in the anthology, Imagining the Black Female Body, edited by Dr. Carol E. Henderson (Palgrave, December 2010).
  • “Telling Secrets in the City: Narrative Possibility and the Urban Environment,” published in Deep into Nature: Ecology, Environment and Children’s Literature edited by Jennifer Harding, Elizabeth Thiel, and Alison Waller (Pied Piper Publishing, UK; Fall 2009).
  • “Writing the Black (W)hole: Facing the Feminist Void,” published in the January 2006 issue of thirdspace, an online feminist journal.
  • “Writing the Unspoken, Framing the Unseen: Witnessing the Past in Contemporary Novels of Slavery,” WarpLand: a Journal of Black Literature and Ideas, Vol. 12, No. 1, 2005.
  • “A Stranger in the Family,” Black Arts Quarterly, a publication of Stanford University’s Committee on Black Performing Arts, Winter 2005.