#LGBT #YALit #Scifi novella EXIT CODE now available!

It's launch day for my future-city novella! 

Danger lurks just down the tracks.
To escape, you'll need the

EXIT CODE

It’s Chicago in the year 2057, and Tren Alvarez is on a date with Geo, the hottest boy in his high school class. Things are going great until Geo suggests they take a ride on the Stacks, the recently built all-city transit system that has practically replaced cars in the Chicago metro area. Tren has an unfounded fear of the Stacks. He even buys into urban legends claiming people have boarded the little carriage pods, slid up onto the snaking tracks, and were never heard from again.

As the date progresses, the boys witness something that suggests Tren isn’t just being paranoid. When they make the mistake of investigating the next day while Tren’s little sister Ezzie is with them, everything turns upside down. Trying to impress somebody he likes quickly turns into trying to save Ezzie – and the whole city of Chicago.

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Diversity in YA Lit

Diversity in YA Literature

by Anne E. Johnson

Previously I wrote about the widespread push -- led by the We Need Diverse Books campaign -- to bring a range of voices to children’s and middle-grade books and stories. This followup column deals with diversity for young adult readers.

Where to Find Out What’s Going On

It’s part of your job as a writer to know what’s out there. Keeping track of diverse representations in YA lit, however, can be tougher than visiting your local bookstore or library. The whole point of We Need Diverse Books is that many types of people are underrepresented in books, and therefore the books are hard to find.

Fortunately, there are some folks ready to help. Diversity in YA, for example, is an entire website devoted to new YA releases with diverse content. Review blog Rich in Color also focuses on diverse lit; this one is kind of a team effort, asking for reader participation to keep their files up to date.

Always a trusty source of kid lit information, the Children’s Book Council offers a list of recommended MG and YA multicultural books. And here’s a list called “Ten authors of color to read in 2015” (yes, it’s okay if you don’t get to these books until 2017).

How to Write It

Learn to write by reading. It’s not a bad game plan. If you want to know how to make your own work more diverse, get to know the work of diverse authors. You might start with this interview featuring three authors who specialize in diverse YA: Aisha Saeed, Sabaa Tahir, and Renee Ahdieh.

Another educational approach for the potential author of diverse YA is to study characters representing diverse groups. School Library Journal has put out a list of disabled characters in YA. The American Library Association offers a list of teen characters with autism in YA books. I’ve mentioned it before, but it’s worth repeating the link to I’m Here, I’m Queer, What the Hell Do I Read, an ongoing list of LGBTQ-related fiction for YA and middle-grade.

Where to Send It

If you have written or plan to write any diverse YA, you’ll need some publishers or agents to consider it. As always, look at the background of everyone you consider: the agents’ client lists and the publishers’ back catalogs. See what they publish. Read interviews to see whether they have an active interest in promoting underrepresented authors or characters or settings or perspective. One example of a publisher with precisely this agenda is the Tu imprint of Lee and Low. You can read their mission statement here.

It may be worthwhile to look into grants or awards, particularly if you are a person of color or disabled, or a member of another diverse group. The 2017 deadline is coming right up (Nov. 1) for WNDB’s Walter Dean Myers Award for YA. (Note: you must qualify according their definition of “diverse” to enter.)

As for agents, besides reading interviews with them and blogs by them, you can also learn a lot from a series in Writers Digest called “30 Literary Agents Seeking Diverse Books Now.”

Good luck, keep writing, and keep expanding your perspective on the world. In can only lead to better stories!

Diversity in Children's Literature

This post originally appeared on the website Eat Sleep Write in 2015.

Please pre-order and support the Young Explorer's Adventure Guide via Kickstarter here.

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Diversity in Children’s Literature

by Anne E. Johnson

In this world of racial tensions that never seem to stop escalating, perhaps one positive step toward peaceful coexistence is to open the minds of the next generation. The children’s literature scene is taking this idea seriously. Publishers and writers are stepping up and speaking out to encourage diversity in kid lit.

Perhaps you have heard of the organization called We Need Diverse Books. Their Twitter hashtags #WNDB and #WeNeedDiverseBooks have garnered worldwide support. Their website offers comprehensive information about writing and spreading diversity in literature, and they have set up outreach programs for schools, resources to help writers wanting to be more inclusive, and awards and grants for authors who match their definition of “diverse.”

While a number of children’s publishers are attempting to be more racially diverse in their offerings, some companies were designed with diversity as their primary goal. British publisher Tamarind (now owned by Random House) has an almost 30-year history of featuring diverse cultures in its children’s books. In the U.S., Lee & Low is at the forefront of publishing with a non-white perspective. You can read Lee & Low’s mission statement here.

Writing about diverse cultures is not the same as representing them personally. Another side of diversity in children’s publishing is the encouragement of diverse ownership of publishing companies. To highlight this issue, the Cooperative Children’s Book Center has put together a list of small presses that publish for children and are owned by people of color.

Race is not the only aspect of a child’s experience that requires a broadened representation in kid lit. There is an excellent website called Disability in Kidlit that deals specifically with books and stories for and about children with physical and developmental challenges. Blogger Lee Wind has garnered well-deserved praise for an excellent book list for LGBT kids called “I’m Here, I’m Queer, What the Hell Do I Read?” The website Rainbow Rumpus offers stories that feature characters with LGBT parents. Editor-in-Chief Liane Bonin Starr described her publication:

Rainbow Rumpus is the world‘s only online literary magazine for children and youth with lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) parents. We publish short stories, illustrations, articles, celebrity interviews and profiles of the children of LGBT parents with the goal of showing young readers a world in which having an LGBT parent or parents is no different than any other. We serve our audience with high-quality writing and artwork which is often used in the classroom as well.  

The key phrase here, I think, is “no different than any other.” If we welcome enough diversity into children’s lit, then perhaps children will grow up realizing that every culture is equally valid.

I’m proud to say that I’ve had several stories published in Rainbow Rumpus. In fact, I write this column as a kid lit author determined to learn to write for the whole world of children, giving credence and respect to all their perspectives, lifestyles, and experiences. That is why I have contributed stories to the first two volumes of an anthology series called the Young Explorer’s Adventure Guide. Corie Weaver, co-founder of Dreaming Robot Press, had this to say about her groundbreaking middle-grade series:

Dreaming Robot Press believes representation matters. Children must be able to envision themselves as the heroes of any story.

Sally Ride, first American woman in space and Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient, famously said: “Young girls need to see role models in whatever careers they may choose, just so they can picture themselves doing those jobs someday. You can’t be what you can’t see.”

The Young Explorer's Adventure Guides are science fiction anthologies geared to the middle grade reader. Girls, boys, people of all skin tones and ableness are the heroes here!

I hope these words inspire you to add diversity to your own writing for children. Here’s an essay for those who want to create a more inclusive setting and characters but don’t know how to begin.

Next time: Diversity in YA lit.

Supernatural London from a Blind POV: The wonders of Elizabeth Watasin's MEDUSA

Today's guest author was determined to see her fictional world through her character's eyes, or, more accurately, through her character's other four senses. Elizabeth Watasin's Medusa features the romantic adventures of a blind woman in an alternative Victorian London. Intrigued? Read on!

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I would like to thank Anne for the opportunity to talk about my latest release, Medusa:

A Dark Victorian Penny Dread. Set in an alternate 1880, mechanical and supernatural London, I'm excited about this story because not only is it my first full romance (I usually write paranormal mystery and adventure with romance on the side), it features blind people as principle characters, having adventures and falling in love. Writing with the perspective in mind of a protagonist blind nearly all her life was (dare I say it?) quite an eye-opener, leading me to rely on our auditory, olfactory, and haptic senses to convey the story. The result was a very sensual experience, especially when I introduce that Elvie Chaisty, my heroine in MEDUSA, likes exploring the marble antiquities in the British Museum by touch.

I also like my characters empowered, in that Elvie should not feel deficit as a blind person (she has no longing to be sighted), desires to be accepted by sighted people (she certainly has an opinion on the sighted's lack of understanding of her world), and doesn't need to be the “facilitator”, shall we say, of a sighted person's personal heroic journey. Elvie gets to be the adventuresome heroine, which, not too much to my surprise, emulates a real life sightless adventurer I was happy to discover during my research: James Holman (1786-1857), who set out to travel the world. With only enough money to travel “native”, and often alone, Holman managed to journey through (per the title of his book), Africa, Asia, Australasia, and America.

Now I don't have Elvie travel beyond London, but just experiencing messy, noisy, smelly, and sometimes astounding Victorian London itself, beyond the doors of the Institute of the Blind (where she resides with her friend and stick for hire, Ellie Hench), is adventuresome enough. To boat for the first time down the Thames, hear Westminster Clock chime, or enjoy the air and sunlight in bucolic Brompton via electric horseless carriage can be singular experiences to a blind person's senses.

I didn't give Elvie super abilities, but the virtues and fallacies of haptic perception in a sighted world. At least, I tried my best to do so, and it was a rewarding experience being in her world. Frankly, I was reluctant to leave it once I typed “the end”. As a reader, you will join her in adventures as one blind, fall in love as one blind, and thus experience more about our world than we sighted can know. I hope you enjoy MEDUSA: A Dark Victorian Penny Dread.

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Learn more about Elizabeth Watasin on her website.

Purchase Medusa on Amazon and B&N.

Writing Baba Ali and the Clockwork Djinn (Part 2 of 2: Co-author Day Al-Mohamed)

Last week I welcomed Danielle Ackley-McPhail to discuss her re-thinking of the classic tale "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves". Now it's time to hear the perspective of her co-author, Day Al-Mohamed. Welcome, Day!

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Diversity and Writing the Neutral that Never Was

by Day Al-Mohamed

Several years ago, I wrote a story with a Chicano protagonist.  I submitted it to my writing group and the first comment I received was, “Why did you make him Hispanic?”  It actually came from several people with the intimation that “adding race” was unnecessary.  At the time, I was taken aback.  The only answer I had was: Because I wanted to. There has been a significant increase in the push for greater diversity in speculative fiction.  #WeNeedDiverseBooks has some great articles, and I strongly advocate reading some of those written by N.K. Jemisin or the ever awesome Daniel Jose Older.

Today, I don’t want to talk about diversity on a personal level, and trust me as an LGBT woman of color with a disability, it doesn’t get much more personal.  But it is also a professional issue that should be addressed by authors.  If you were to ask me (and this was a question I received from a recent convention panel): Do I think writers have an obligation to write diversely?  I would say, “Yes.”  Immediately, people bristle at being told they should do something, and get worried about writing something they are not, getting it wrong, tokenism, cultural appropriation etc. but let me explain.

Writers have an obligation to build fully realized worlds, and yes, that means diverse worlds. Look around.  In a single day, how many women do you meet? How many people of other races, nationalities, religions, sexual orientations, or disabilities do you see? How often do we see signs or menus or television programming in other languages?  How many expressions of faith do we come across? What about unique ways of dressing or speaking?  If this world has so much diversity, then so should those worlds we create. It isn’t just about diverse writing but about good writing.

When we’re young and when we first start writing, without meaning to, we’re taught to write to the default.  What’s worse, we’re taught to think to the default and that default is white, male, and heterosexual.  Let me give you a recent example. In the current World Cup excitement we heard commentators, regularly referring to Landon Donovan as the "all-time U.S. leading goal scorer." He has 57 international goals. The all-time U.S. leading goal scorer is Abby Wambach, with 167 goals. The second highest scorer is Mia Hamm at 158 goals, followed by Kristine Lilly who, at 130 goals has more than doubled Donovan’s scoring. Notice something? They’re all women.  When we talk and think about the sport, the “neutral” is men’s. 

Valerie Alexander in her recent article gives another example: “When Sonia Sotomayor was being confirmed for the Supreme Court, members of Congress repeatedly asked her (repeatedly) if, as a Latina, she would be able to remain neutral. I don't recall ever in the history of confirmation hearings, anyone asking, "As a white male, do you think you'll be able to remain neutral when deciding issues of law?"” Here, the neutral is Caucasian.

And yes, as writers we fall into this default thinking too. We write the default.  And just like my writing group, whether they meant it or not, we feel like we have to have some reason, or qualification for the character to be something other than the default. Why does the character have a disability? What is the significance of their race? Because it makes them who they are.  Shouldn’t we want wonderful complex characters who interact with their society from a variety of feelings, thoughts, and identities?  Shouldn’t we want a richer world with the complicated push-pull of politics, religion, race, culture? The default can make for a good story, diversity will make for a great one.  

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You can learn more about Day Al-Mohamed on her website.

You can purchase Baba Ali and the Clockwork Djinn on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other retailers.