Tag Archives: children’s literature

Jun 18 2014

Soccer Mania Sweeps Scholastic as World Cup Plays Out in Brazil

By Concetta Gleason
Editorial & Creative Coordinator for Scholastic’s Club Leo

The original post can be found here on Scholastic’s site.

The World Cup kicked off Thursday, June 12, and Club Leo en Español has been cheering on our favorite teams ever since. Safe to say, soccer mania has swept Scholastic! The World Cup is the largest fútbol (aka soccer, in North America) competition in the world. Every four years a different country has the honor of hosting the games. This year, the World Cup is being hosted by Brazil. It’s the first time in almost 30 years that the games will be played in Latin America. Brazil is a soccer haven, having won the Cup a total of four times thus far. In fact, Pelé— arguably fútbol’s greatest star—hails from Brazil. Pelé is the only player to have been a world champion three times. He won in 1958, 1962, and 1970.

The World Cup is a global phenomenon and Club Leo en Español is showcasing the bilingual book Soccermania/Futbolmanía to celebrate the games. Soccermania/Futbolmanía is a great resource for learning about wild antics and fun back stories from the history of the World Cup and the game of fútbol. Some of these facts need to be read to believed! Let’s take a sneak peek at some info from the book.

Fun and Wacky Facts About Fútbol:

1. The first World Cup was played in Uruguay in 1930. At the time, different countries had different rules for the game and some of FIFA’s universal rules were still in flux. The finalists, Uruguay and Argentina, couldn’t agree on what type of ball to use. As a compromise the first half was played with an Argentinean ball and the second half with a Uruguayan ball. (Uruguay won!)

2. How many soccer balls are made every year around the world? A hundred million!

3. While fútbol may have officially started in the United Kingdom in the mid-1800s,  many ancient cultures played sports that resemble the game:

  • China played a game called cuju during the Han Dynasty.
  • Greece played a game called episkyros more than 2,000 years ago.
  • The Roman Empire played a game called harpastum more than 1,500 years ago.
  • Japan played a game called kemari 1,400 years ago.

4. The Nike Corporation makes fútbol attire and memorabilia out of plastic bottles. It takes eight bottles to make a shirt and five bottles to make a pair of shorts.

Check out Soccermania/Futbolmanía to learn more interesting and surprising facts! Below are some more exciting resources for fútbol fans, old and new:

La historia de los Mundiales (History of the World Cup)

Pelé, King of Soccer/Pelé, el rey del fútbol

Enjoy the World Cup, and let’s honor the sport’s ability to unify people around the world by living up to the 2014 slogan: “All in one rhythm.”

Author’s Note: Club Leo en Español supports your classroom with fun and affordable books that connect children’s home language and learning. Our books include amazing series, original titles, and winners of the Pura Belpré Award, which celebrates the remarkable contributions of artists who give voice to the Latino community through children’s literature.

Club Leo en Español apoya tu salón de clases con libros divertidos y asequibles que conectan la lengua materna y el aprendizaje de los niños. Nuestra colección incluye increíbles series, títulos originales y ganadores del Premio Pura Belpré, que celebra los extraordinarios aportes de artistas que dan voz a la comunidad latina a través de la literatura infantil.

Jun 17 2014

Illustrator Joe Cepeda Talks to Latin@s in Kid Lit, Part 2

By Lila Quintero Weaver

We’re continuing a fascinating conversation with acclaimed illustrator Joe Cepeda. His work graces many Latin@-themed children’s books. Did you miss the first installment? Go here.

Lila: When did your interest in art begin? How did you train for a career in illustration?

Joe: When I was young, I enjoyed drawing enough that my mom enrolled me at the Los Angeles Music and Art School in East Los Angeles, a small jewel of a place where I first tried painting. By my teens, though, I stopped going and after graduating high school found myself headed to college to study engineering. It took me awhile before I changed all of that. Initially, I thought I’d be an editorial cartoonist, but as soon as I got a brush back in my hand, I realized I wanted to do something that had an artfulness to it as well. Illustration afforded the perfect combination of content and creative articulation for me.

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To be honest, my training was largely guided toward editorial work. I sort of fell into children’s books. Creating a piece for a magazine article is much like doing work for a cover. There is a certain amount of seduction employed in influencing a magazine reader to stop and read an article, much the way you’d want someone to pick up a book off a shelf. A combination of abstraction, mystery, emotion, and information might play a role in creating that single image that will lure the audience in.

From the books I’ve illustrated, I pretty much taught myself sequential image-making and continue to do that. With a portfolio largely lacking any real samples that reflected page-turning sensibilities, it was very fortunate that I was signed up to illustrate those first books. I believe that it was an inclination to write a picture as much as illustrate one that may have been evident to my first editors and art directors. They seem to have responded to that and took a risk. I’m grateful to them for doing so.

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Lila: Most of us have no idea how an illustrator goes about his work. Can you give us a tour of the process?

Joe: In many ways, the real work is done throughout the sketch phase. For editorial work, I usually create a few alternate ideas for a director to choose from. The sketches need to be tight enough for the director to envision the finished art.

For books, the sketch process is more comprehensive. The first sketches are thumbnails in which I mostly brainstorm, trying to find the basic rhythm, character introduction, action, choreography of the story, etc. The second phase of sketches, laid out as a dummy (a design/template that allows you to see the whole book planned out) focuses on the essential content of the story, as well as soundly composing the images. This is the working plan to be shared with editors and art directors. It’s important to understand that this design is as much for others as it is for oneself. This is where mistakes are caught.

Finally, in the last draft of sketches, details are included to a more specific degree. The emotions of your images many times are expressed in the details of your illustrations. It’s where things become funny, scary, thrilling, suspenseful, etc. This shouldn’t be confused with complexity—a simple picture has as much power as an ornate one. Once the dummy is okayed, it’s on to the finished work. Almost all of my books have been executed as oil paintings over acrylic under-paintings on illustration board. A recent book I illustrated was delivered as digitally rendered finishes. Whatever your medium of choice, the more confident you are of your plan, the more enjoyable the last part of the process will be. I leave color out of the initial plans because I prefer to be responsive when it comes to that, leaving a level of spontaneity for the end.

Milagros_jacket_finish72Lila: Let’s close out this conversation by returning to a book cover, the one you recently did for the e-book version of Meg Medina’s Milagros: A Girl from Away. It’s breathtaking, truly exceptional. I know Meg was thrilled with it!

Joe: Thanks for the kind words. Milagros is a great story and it was a wonderful opportunity to illustrate the cover of the e-book. After reading the manuscript, I couldn’t help responding to Milagros as a girl between two worlds. It’s the “between” part that intrigued me as a source for creating a provocative image. Milagros is not only traveling from one place to another, as she does in the story, she’s also between the clarity of a wide-open sky and the deep mystery and profundity of the ocean. The magical realism of the story, in my mind, calls for a more symbolic and open-ended image. Alternative ideas depicted Milagros closer to the viewer, larger in the design. This would emphasize Milagros more. A reader might respond to that kind of image, “That girl looks like me, i want to read about her.” It’s certainly popular to create covers that are more character-based, but, I’m glad that we decided to go the other way, that is, emphasizing the mystery, the peril of the journey, and the hopefulness and optimism of Milagros’ spirit. A reader here might ask, “Where is that girl going? What is she facing? Is she lost? Is she on her way somewhere? Is she safe? Will she get there? What will she find? Keeping her small in the design also helps the reader ask, “Who is she?” My first sketches didn’t include the manta ray, inclined to depict Milagros navigating her way alone, but, as we discussed, it’s a central part of the story. I’m glad mantas are such mysterious and, perhaps, very poetic creatures. I wanted it to have an ambiguous posture… is it a threat to her, or is it a witness, or, even something more? For me, the more questions you ask when looking at a cover, the better a cover does its job.

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To learn more about Joe’s craftsmanship and illustration technique, see this extensive interview by Kathleen Temean.

Want to see Joe in his studio and hear more of his story? Here’s a video interview, worth the double click-through!

 

Jun 16 2014

Illustrator Joe Cepeda Talks to Latin@s in Kid Lit, Part 1

By Lila Quintero Weaver

Long before I met Joe Cepeda at the National Latino Children’s Literature Conference in 2012, a post card of the cover illustration of Pam Muñoz Ryan’s Esperanza Rising was tacked to my then-11-year-old daughter’s bedroom wall. Every time I glanced at that soaring figure, my spirits lifted. Surely part of the book’s enormous success can be traced back to Joe’s luminous cover painting of Esperanza floating above the California earth, but that’s hardly the end of his contribution to children’s literature.

Lila: Welcome to Latin@s in Kid Lit, Joe! Thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to talk art and books. Let’s start our conversation with Esperanza Rising. How did you come up with the concept?

Joe: After seeing the title, it wasn’t too difficult to imagine young Esperanza in the air. My first sketch depicted Esperanza with her hair and dress floating behind her as if she were flying. Almost immediately, however, I changed it and flipped her dress and pretty dark tresses to sweep in front of her. What I realized is that I didn’t want to show Esperanza as if she were navigating in the air on her own. I wanted her to be swept away by the wind. Everyone who has read the book knows that Esperanza’s life changes from one day to the next and I wanted the image to reflect that life-altering event, as well as the hopefulness her story and name literally implies.

EsperanzaJacket72 copy 2Lila: What does it mean to you to have your work as the cover of such a powerful story?

Joe: A great deal. It’s never a bad thing to have your work associated with a story that has such resonance. In contrast to doing an illustration for a magazine, which has a very short life, a book hangs around longer. A book that continues to reach so many readers, year after year, is wonderful for the life of the image as well. Beyond that, one is always striving to create work that might emotively uplift the reader. It’s a beautiful story and if the cover helps to do just that, it’s very gratifying.

Lila: Your list of children’s books includes quite a few with Latino or African American characters. Does being Latino influence your development of minority characters and the worlds they inhabit? SideBySide_04_72

Joe: This is always a bit of a difficult question to answer, perhaps because I think very little about it when I’m illustrating books about people of color. I’d say the books that I see that seem to miss the mark ethnically/culturally seem to overthink it. There are a lot of things I may consider in developing a character before I get to their ethnic depiction. Does she wear glasses? Is she thin? Short? Should he be neat or a bit of a slob? Is he forgetful? Would he wear a hat? Many of the of the character’s inclinations and look are not included in the manuscript. By the time I get to the character’s cultural look, it kind of takes care of itself.

I wrote a story, The Swing, that took place in a neighborhood just like the street I grew up on. I’m Chicano, and I could write and illustrate that story about Chicano neighbors from a very immediate and intimate place. East Los Angeles isn’t Spanish Harlem, though, nor is it Little Havana. It seems to me illustrating stories about those Latino communities wouldn’t be all that different than illustrating a story about Inuits in the Arctic, Mongolians living in Yurts, or a story set in the Deep South. I’m respectful of the content and information that presents itself in illustrating stories of people of color, but I don’t live there that long. My preference is not to develop minority characters as much as illuminate the story that’s being told. For me, every step toward “development” is one toward information, accuracy and specificity, which is all fine and good, but it might also be one more step away from grandness and magic… and the informal joy of uncertainty and open-endedness.

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Lila: What’s on your drawing board right now?

Joe: Starting a new bilingual book based on a kid’s song. Writing a story for a picture book. Lunch.

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And that’s not the end of Joe’s fascinating interview. Please stay tuned for tomorrow’s  follow-up post!

 second_pic_4x6_72Joe Cepeda is an award-winning illustrator of children’s books who also works in magazine illustration. He lives in California and serves as president of the Society of Illustrators of Los Angeles. For more information, visit his website.

Jun 2 2014

Guest Post: Margarita Engle’s Passion for Writing About Hope and Forgotten Heroes

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By Margarita Engle

Recently, I was asked what “legacy” I hope to leave by writing. Legacy is an intimidating word, but at least one portion of the answer is fairly simple. I love writing about independent thinkers who have been forgotten by history. These lost heroes might have been celebrated in their own times, or they may have worked in such obscurity that their names are unknown. Many are famous in their countries of origin, but have never been introduced to readers in the U.S.

Just a few years ago, any library search for children’s books about Latinos would have revealed little more than a series of shamefully inaccurate works glorifying brutal conquistadores. During the interim, excellent biographies of César Chávez and Sonia Sotomayor have been added, along with a handful of beautiful picture books about artists, writers, and musicians.

Surrende TreeThe work of reclaiming lost heroes has barely begun. My own approach is not strictly biographical because I love writing verse novels, and I also love writing first person interpretations of historical events. I often mix historical figures with fictional characters. In other words, I feel free to explore, experiment, and imagine. It’s a process that feels like time travel. Diaries, letters, and journals are my most important research materials, because they contain the emotional essence of history, along with the meticulous details of daily life. When I wrote The Poet Slave of Cuba, I was fortunate to have access to Juan Francisco Manzano’s autobiographical notes, which had been smuggled off the island by British abolitionists. For The Surrender Tree, I could not find anything written by Rosa la Bayamesa or any of Cuba’s other courageous wartime nurses, so I read the diaries of rebel soldiers, as well as interviews with reconcentration camp survivors. The Lightning Dreamer is based on the poetry and prose of Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, who wrote a groundbreaking interracial romance novel that was published more than a decade before Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Not only was Sab far more daring, it was also more influential in Europe and Latin America. So why don’t North Americans know Avellaneda’s name? Does it make sense to learn only about our own little corners of the world?

Hope is at the heart of every topic I choose. I love to write about people I admire. In general, I admire them because they were independent thinkers, far ahead of their times, or because their courage took the form of kindness. I don’t see history as a series of wars, with dates of battles to memorize and names of generals who are automatically assumed to be heroic. My heroes are the ordinary people who made hopeful choices in times that must have seemed hopeless. Tropical Secrets and Silver People are examples of topics so huge—the Holocaust, and construction of the Panama Canal—that I chose to write primarily in the voices of fictional composite characters, rather than individual historical figures. For Hurricane Dancers, the absence of first person indigenous Cuban accounts of the Conquest forced me to rely on a combination of legends, imagination, and the diaries of priests. I read the journals of conquistadores with skepticism, because they were written with a specific agenda—trying to make themselves look heroic, so that they could apply for additional funds from the Spanish Crown.

final Silver People cover-1Lightning Dreamer notable-1

Not all of my books are verse novels, and not all are for young adults. One of my favorite challenges is writing picture books about people who are not considered “famous enough” for biographical works. This limitation has actually helped me present my historical picture book manuscripts simply as inspiring stories, instead of struggling to make the subjects seem more famous than they are. Some are not famous at all, simply because Latinos, other minorities, and women, have generally been omitted from earlier historical writings. Sadly, recent history books tend to copy the earlier ones. The result is an entire segment of classroom curricula and pleasure reading with no representation of forgotten groups.

At present, I have several biographical picture books already in the publishing pipeline, and several that are still searching for publishers. None of them are about easily recognized names, if you live in the U.S. Thankfully, with the help of wonderful editors and fantastic illustrators, I hope that these picture books will inspire young readers. Drum Dream Girl (Harcourt, 2015) is being illustrated by the amazing Rafael López, whose gorgeous art will help illuminate the life of a ten-year-old Chinese-African-Cuban girl who broke the island’s taboo against female drummers. The Sky Painter (Two Lions, 2015) will have beautiful, scientifically accurate illustrations by Aliona Bereghici, to show how a boy of Puerto Rican origin became the world’s greatest bird artist, by allowing birds to live, instead of following Audubon’s tradition of killing and posing them.

If children have heard Latin jazz or visited New York’s Natural History Museum, they’ve heard and seen the results of Millo Castro’s courage and Louis Agassiz Fuertes’ kindness, even though they are unlikely to have seen those names in a library or classroom. I firmly believe that it is time to make room for books about the lives of people who should be famous, rather than limiting young readers to books about people who are already famous.

No discussion of biographical writing is complete without the subject of autobiography. Writing a childhood memoir has been the greatest challenge of my life. It is strictly nonfiction—no imagining, only remembering. Certain memories are excruciatingly painful. I love recalling childhood trips to visit my extended family in Cuba, but I dread remembering the October 1962 Missile Crisis that ended those journeys. Enchanted Air, a Cold War Memoir (Atheneum, 2015) combines the two. Positive and negative. Joy and sorrow. Despair and hope. With a powerful cover illustration by one of the world’s greatest artists, Edel Rodríguez, this memoir already feels like my life’s work. It is a book that helps me reclaim the separated half of my family, and along with them, the half of my identity that was almost destroyed by politicians.

Writing about lives is a process of exploration, so even though the memoir feels like my life’s work, I’ve already found other people I hope to depict in verse novels and picture books. I’ve returned to the research stage, reading history, and deciding which parts of history have not yet been honestly portrayed.

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Margarita-HavanaMargarita Engle is the Cuban-American author of many young adult verse novels, including The Surrender Tree, which received the first Newbery Honor ever awarded to a Latino/a. Her books have also received multiple Pura Belpré Awards and Honors, as well as three Américas Awards and the Jane Addams Peace Award. Margarita’s newest verse novel is Silver People, Voices From the Panama Canal, and her newest picture book is Tiny Rabbit’s Big Wish. She lives in central California, where she enjoys hiding in the forest to help train her husband’s wilderness search and rescue dogs. For more information, visit her author site and enjoy interviews by Caroline Starr Rose  and Robyn Hood Black.

May 15 2014

Book Review: Moony Luna: Luna, Lunita Lunera by Jorge Argueta

1294182By Sonia Alejandra Rodriguez

DESCRIPTION FROM THE BOOK JACKET: Five-year-old Luna isn’t at all sure she wants to go to school. For all she knows, there might be monsters there. But when her loving parents assure her that she’ll have a wonderful time playing and learning, she agrees to give school a try. An understanding teacher and a group of friendly kids make Luna very, very glad she made the right decision. But what about the monsters?

MY TWO CENTS: Five year old Luna Lunita Lunera fears that she will meet monsters on her first day of school. Her adoring parents remind her that she is a big girl now, bigger than the moon, and that there is nothing to fear. She finds the courage she needs to get to school but decides that maybe school is not such a good idea after all. Again, her parents encourage her to find her big girl strength and take her to school. While there, Luna is still not convinced that there are no monsters at her school and hides under a table. Her fellow classmates look for her and ask her to come out and play. Luna joins them in all the singing and coloring and decides that maybe school is not so bad. At pick up, she tells her parents that there were no monsters at school and that tomorrow she will be bigger and stronger than the moon!

Author Jorge Argueta and illustrator Elizabeth Gomez give life to the most adorable character in Latin@ children’s literature. Together they have created an encouraging and loving story about a child’s fears about her first day of school. One of the fascinating aspects of this book is the multiple ways that Luna’s story is told. Because it’s a bilingual book, something that is very common among Latin@ children’s books, the story is told is Spanish and English. Simultaneously, Gomez’s illustration present an additional storyline–the “monster’s” first day of school. Gomez’s illustrations suggest that there is indeed a monster at school and that it is also afraid of its first day of school.

Another significant factor in this text is the positive representation of the parents. Luna’s mom and dad are present throughout this pivotal moment in her life. Her mother reads her a bed time story at night and her father braids her hair in the morning. And both of them go to pick her up. Their presence is extremely important because it challenges negative and harmful stereotypes about Latino parents taking a back seat in their child’s education. Such stereotypes are further challenged by allowing the character of the mother to be there to read Luna a bed time story.

Lastly, the promotion of bilingual education, seen through the offering of the story in Spanish and English and through the depiction of Luna’s classroom as a bilingual classroom with a Latina teacher, is extremely powerful. Given national attacks on bilingual education and budget cuts on such programs, Argueta and Gomez present a wonderful opportunity to advocate for bilingual and multicultural education. Overall, this book is a must read and must have because it’s way brilliant.

FOR MORE INFORMATION about Moony Luna: Luna, Lunita Lunera visit your local library or bookstore. Also check out worldcat.org, indiebound.org, goodreads.com, amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, and Children’s Book Press/Lee & Low Books.

headshotSonia Alejandra Rodríguez has been an avid reader since childhood. Her literary world was first transformed when she read Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless me, Última as a high school student and then again as a college freshman when she was given a copy of Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street. Sonia’s academic life and activism are committed to making diverse literature available to children and youth of color. Sonia received her B.A. in English from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is currently a PhD candidate at the University of California, Riverside, where she focuses her dissertation on healing processes in Latina/o Children’s and Young Adult Literature.

May 5 2014

Let’s All Make the #WeNeedDiverseBooks Campaign an Ongoing Movement

By Patrick Flores-Scott

#WeNeedDiverseBooks. The trending hashtag is a channel for conversation around the huge problem of a lack of diversity in children’s literature. The problem has been noted in many recent articles and so have the reasons we need more books by diverse authors and books with complex, real diverse characters.

For many years I was lucky to be a public school teacher in very diverse schools. At different points I was both a general education classroom teacher and a reading specialist. As a classroom teacher, I was able to seek and find the books I wanted my class to hear and read. More often than not, these books had main characters of color. I had the time, energy, resources, and relationships that helped me find great books that my students loved.

My students, however, especially my reluctant readers, were not going to work so hard to find a book that would reflect the cultural, racial, socio-economic realities of their community. They were going to pick the available book, the one closest to their hand when it was time to leave the library, or the trendy book that made them look like they were in the reading “know.”

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Author Angela Cervantes posted this picture on Twitter during the #WeNeedDiverseBooks Campaign.

Students need to be able to accidentally stumble their way into a great book that reflects their own background or one that opens their eyes to new characters and communities. They shouldn’t have to work for it. They shouldn’t have to fight for it. Kids have enough on their plate. Yes, some students are going to research authors, seek out new books and reading experiences, challenge their school librarian and make demands. Most fifth graders, however, are just struggling to make it through the day. They end up with the default book… and given the math of the situation, they’re going to walk out with another book by a white author with a white main character. Is this a tragedy? In the moment, no. That default book might be a great one. But this scene takes place over and over each day in most schools in the country and that great book–if the student is lucky–may just be another in a long line of books that reinforces the notion that great books are written by white authors and that white kids are the ones worthy of books written about them.  This notion is a toxic one, regardless of a student’s background.

Children’s books are a piece of a larger pie. A lack of diversity in film and television reinforces the notion that white stories are more relevant than non-white stories. The make-up the Senate (97 out 0f 100 are white) reinforces the notion that non-whites do not have a role in the highest levels of politics. Yes, there is the President, but his cabinet is made up of 70% white males. Kids see this. They see thousands of African American college athletes and they know that, in the vast majority of cases, these athletes are led to battle by white coaches. They know that the percentages of Black and Latino men in prison are crazily out of proportion with the population of Black and Latino men. Kids see all this. They take it in. The perceptions become realities for them.

My wife and I are the proud, exhausted parents of two rambunctious little boys. Their grandparents are Mexican-American on their mom’s side. My parents are white. My dad is from the U.S., my mom a Spanish-speaking Latina from South America. We will raise our boys to be proud of all that they are and proud of all the Latino, Caucasian, African-American, Asian and mixes of the aforementioned that make up their diverse extended family. While we will do our best to teach that the content of one’s character, not the color of one’s skin (one’s gender, sexual orientation, physical ability) is what is important, television, our political and judicial systems, sports…. And even the make-up of CHILDREN’S BOOKS, will send messages that complicate, skew, and even deem our parental message well-meaning, but just wrong.

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The Oakland Public Library in California posted lots of great pictures like this one on Twitter during the #WeNeedDiverseBooks Campaign.

What do we do about it? The #WeNeedDiverseBooks Movement (Can it please be a movement? We need more movements around here.) is a potentially very important call for change in the children’s book world. Now, we need to push for intentionality. Gatekeepers need to have their feet held to the fire. The Movement (!) needs to push publishers to set goals that trend their books in a more realistically diverse direction. It needs to push the industry to hire editors from diverse backgrounds and to hire and support diverse interns and entry-level assistants who can have the power to move books off the pile and into editors’ hands. The Movement needs to hold publishers accountable.

Institutions which support writers and illustrators, like my beloved SCBWI, need to recruit underrepresented writers to their conferences. (And to check out the percentage of white male panelists and speakers compared to the percentage of white male attendees.) Groups like SCBWI need to be pushed to intentionally foster and mentor a more diverse writing community.

The movement needs to push us published authors of all colors and stripes, to mentor diverse up-and-comers, to include pro-bono school visits to underfunded schools, and to write real, complex, fallible diverse characters who live the entirety of the American experience.

Members of The Movement need to request diverse books at their bookstores and libraries. We need to post reviews on Amazon and Goodreads and library websites. Members of the Movement need to advise book bloggers and to follow and support blogs like this one. We need to give diverse books as birthday presents and to talk about our favorites on the bus, at work, in line at the bookstore…

Members of The Movement need to push our political leaders to support the health, education and welfare of our future readers and writers.

Publishers, agents, bookstore workers, librarians, teachers, authors… there are bunches these folks out there doing the positive stuff that will make change possible. The Movement needs to support them and it needs to push for intentionality in those who mean well, but have not yet made the move to change.

PatrickFS1Patrick Flores-Scott was, until recently, a long-time public school teacher in Seattle, Washington. He’s now a stay-at-home dad and early morning writer in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Patrick’s first novel, Jumped In, has been named to a YALSA 2014 Best Fiction for Young Adults book, an NCSS/CBC Notable Book for the Social Studies and a Bank Street College Best Book of 2014. He is currently working on his second book, American Road Trip.

Jumped In was featured in Libros Latin@s on Thursday. Click here to see the overview.