Coming in September: Spotlight on #OwnVoices

Here at Reading While White we are approaching our first anniversary, and we've decided to celebrate by focusing on the positive for the month of September. Rather than talking about what's wrong in children's and YA books, we're going to talk about what's right. We want to shine the spotlight on some of the amazing books that have been written by authors and artists of color and Native authors and illustrators.

We've been inspired by Dr. Ebony Thomas and her graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania who've tweeted daily book recommendations under the tag #HealingFictions as part of their Humanizing Stories project.  We've also been inspired by Corinne Duyvis who created the #OwnVoices hashtag to recommend books with diverse characters created by authors and illustrators from the same diverse group.

The RWW team is committed to posting a review each day during the month of September of a book we highly recommend that represents #OwnVoices. Most of them will be new books, but we'll also include a few that have been around a while.

There are a lot of great #OwnVoices books out there that we want to shine a spotlight on.  We hope you will be inspired to find these books, check them out, buy them, read them, talk about them, and share them with the children and teens in your lives.  And don't do it just because these books represent diversity. Do it because they're great books!