January 27 – Counting Down to Multicultural Children’s Book Day 2016.
For Multicultural Children’s Book Day 2016 (MCCBD) on January 27, 2016, Robert Liu-Trujillo designed this fantastic poster. Robert is a visual artist helping support Multicultural Children’s Book Day 2016 because his mission is the same. He wants his son to see himself in books.
As our nation grows more and more diverse, we need books to reflect children of many different cultures, traditions and race. All children want to see kids like themselves in stories they read at home and at school. Here’s why I’m so excited to participate as a Platinum Sponsor of the Multicultural Children’s Book Day 2016 online event: 10 Reasons To Read Diversely from Lee and Low Books:
- The world is diverse, so why shouldn’t our books be?
- It’s boring to only read about people just like you.
- Heroes come in all shapes and sizes.
- Diverse books inspire us to be the authors of our own stories.
- Walking in someone else’s shoes builds empathy.
- Diverse books make us feel seen and understood.
- Reading diversely can help turn nonreaders into readers.
- Understanding different cultures helps us succeed in a global world.
- Magic happens when we step outside of our comfort zones.
- Diverse books redefine who and what we can be.
Source: Lee & Low Books. I’ve had an amazing experience creating children’s books with diverse characters. Because the children are part of my own family, I don’t think of them as “different” from me, though their skin color is brown and I’m white. What’s been eye-opening is how the rest of the world sees them. Publishers generally shy away from books that may not sell because of a child’s race. That’s one of the reasons for the huge gap in diversity in children’s literature for the past 25 years. When only 10% of kids books include children of color, it stands to reason that overall proportion of sales will be small.
I’m counting the days until Multicultural Children’s Book Day 2016!
