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Tag: jason reynolds
Two book festivals in Maryland have kick-started the summer off in a year when literary diversity is under attack in the form of book bans.
Books in Bloom and Gaithersburg Book Festival held family-friendly community events that featured a number of authors who either identify on the diversity spectrum or are passionate about freedom of speech in literature. Over the last year, more parents nationwide are asking school libraries to take books off shelves they deem inappropriate for their children to read while some libraries are reactively subtracting books to avoid controversy.
This movement of banning books is sparking opposition as authors and readers alike are going out of their way to support not only freedom of speech but support the variety of books meant to be read by children. The political divide was felt at these book festivals and may become a theme for other similar events in the U.S. throughout the year.
Banned books gain spotlight
Books in Bloom calls itself a progressive book festival in the master-planned city of Columbia, Maryland. To show support for banned books, the festival dedicated one of its soundstages to authors who discussed freedom of speech.
A vibrant setting in Merriweather District’s Color Burst Park, the book festival had a giant book-shaped display describing some of the top banned books in history from Toni Morrison‘s Beloved and Song of Solomon to Alice Walker‘s The Color Purple. With Busboys and Poets as the independent bookstore for the event and a location in the park, most books for sale were books by authors who are Black and/or LGBTQIA+.
Queer memoirs All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson and Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe had notable stacks on the tables with other titles that have become the face of many bans though they were created for the middle grade and young adult audiences. The bans are usually due to racial and cultural content, sexually explicit content, and offensive language.
Headliners included a panel with PEN America, the nonprofit organization advocating in the intersection of literature and human rights to protect free expression, and Democratic U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland’s 8th congressional district and author of Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy. Raskin also attended Gaithersburg Book Festival to sell and sign his latest book.
The book festival’s keynote speaker was Carl Bernstein, the well-known The Washington Post reporter who co-headed the news coverage on the Watergate scandal in 1972. On the festival’s main stage, he marveled at his time growing up around Columbia and how he first became a cub reporter as a high school dropout in his new memoir, Chasing History: A Kid In The Newsroom.
The last Books in Bloom was held less than a year ago in-person in October with The New York Times reporter and The 1619 Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones serving as the keynote speaker.
Diverse works lead way
Reminiscent of a large outdoor book festival such as Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, Gaithersburg Book Festival in Gaithersburg, Maryland marked its 12th year as an event supporting the greater community with inviting traditionally published authors and offering seminars on book publishing and creative writing for children and adults.
Authors such Dhonielle Clayton, who has a new middle grade release with The Marvellers, and Kimberly Jones, who is promoting her social justice young adult novel Why We Fly with co-author Gilly Segal, discussed their works at the annual event. Dhonielle, a Gaithersburg native, and Kimberly are some of the top YA Black authors who have been outspoken about diversity in literature and social justice matters.
Asked about some of her summer read recommendations, Dhonielle mentioned Valentina Salazar Is Not a Monster Hunter by Zoraida Córdova; the Track series by Jason Reynolds; and The Devouring Wolf by Natalie C. Parker, in which Dhonielle says there’s a wolf character named after her.
Another author at the event was Jeanine Cummins, who gained notoriety with her immigration novel American Dirt, interviewing Reyna Grande about her book A Ballad of Love and Glory. American Dirt follows a Mexican woman trying to escape to the U.S. with her young son after her family is murdered.
Some high-profile Hispanic and Latine authors spoke out about the White Latina author’s seven-figure advance because they said the publishing industry would never offer them such a sum for centering stories on Hispanic and Latine characters. They also claimed the book had inaccuracies in the culture and language that wasn’t native to the author. On the other hand, there were Hispanic and Latine authors and celebrities who supported the Oprah’s Book Club selection.
Since American Dirt came out in 2020, Jeanine, like many authors who had released their works at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, now have the chance to work the promotion circuit in-person.
Social justice and historical nonfiction were the focus of many authors’ works at the book festival. Gayle Jessup White talked about her lineage connected to former slave-holding president Thomas Jefferson in her book Reclamation: Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson, and a Descendant’s Search for Her Lasting Legacy. Kristin Henning shared her experience representing Black youth in the D.C. court system and how she conceived the idea for her book The Rage of Innocence: How America Criminalizes Black Youth.
Along with Raskin, Democratic U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff for California’s 28th congressional district visited the event to chat about his book Midnight in Washington: How We Almost Lost Our Democracy and Still Could.
D.C. area indie bookstore chain Politics and Prose served as the event bookseller.
The pre-summer book festivals helped usher in the first literary events for authors and readers to enjoy as society emerges out of the pandemic and the world of book publishing remains volatile in the wake of book bans.
A young adult author’s video interview discussing how race, socioeconomic status, and history are the root of the latest civil unrest has gone viral.
Kimberly Jones, the co-author of the young adult novel I’m Not Dying With You Tonight along with Gilly Segal, passionately spelled out why people are protesting, rioting, or looting after the Memorial Day death of George Floyd, who was killed by police officers in Minneapolis. His death has sparked nationwide civil unrest as the U.S. slowly comes out of the COVID-19 quarantine.
In a George Floyd tribute T-shirt, Kimberly says she supports both viewpoints from Black people saying they don’t want rioting or looting in our communities and they don’t want to support mainstream White-centric businesses. She then breaks down the difference between protestors, rioters, and looters—a definition that the media struggles with in its reporting, which leads to people misunderstanding the situation such as in the example with the Red Sofa Literary Agency founder who called police on people she classified as looters last month.
“Let’s ask ourselves why in this country in 2020 the financial gap between poor Blacks and the rest of the world is at such a distance that people feel like their only hope and only opportunity to get some of the things that we flaunt and flash in front of them all the time is to walk through a broken glass window and get it,” Kimberly says in the video.
“But they are so hopeless that getting that necklace, getting that TV, getting that change, getting that bed, getting that phone, whatever it is they’re going to get because in that moment when riots happen and they present an opportunity of looting that’s their only opportunity to get it. We need to be questioning that. Why are people that poor? Why are people that broke? Why are people that food-insecure, that clothing-insecure?”
What also helped the video go viral is her Monopoly comparison to how economics work in America.
“If I right now decided to play Monopoly with you and for four hundred rounds of playing Monopoly, I didn’t allow you to have any money,” she says, pointing to the four centuries that Black people have been in the U.S. dealing with injustice after injustice. “I didn’t allow you to have anything on the board. I didn’t allow for you to have anything. And then we play another fifty rounds of Monopoly and everything that you gained and you earned while playing that round of Monopoly was taken from you.
“That was Tulsa, that was Rosewood. Those were places we built Black economic wealth, and we were self-sufficient. We owned our stores. When we owned our property. And they burned them to the ground.”
She refers to the race massacres in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921 and Rosewood, Florida in 1923 in which White mobs destroyed thriving Black communities. Descendants of people who were impacted by those massacres are calling for reparations.
In a tweet, Kimberly wrote, “I just took the time to go through the first hundred or so responses in this thread and I am FLOORED! The support is so welcome and overwhelming.”
https://twitter.com/kimlatricejones/status/1269275215663685635
Titled “How Can We Win,” the video interview is on YouTube via David Jones Media and has a timestamp of being posted on June 1 and the interview conducted on May 31. David Jones wrote in the video’s summary:
“On day two, Sunday the 31st, he activated his dear friend author Kimberly Jones to tag along and conduct interviews. During a moment of downtime he captured these powerful words from her and felt the world couldn’t wait for the full length documentary, they needed to hear them now.”
Academy Award-winning filmmaker Matthew A. Cherry, who recently received the golden Oscar statue for his six-minute film and accompanying book Hair Love illustrated by Vashti Harrison, shared the video on June 5.
Authors like Angie Thomas and Jason Reynolds were quick to point out that Kimberly is a Black author who deserves the support with the purchase of her book. Harper Collins Publishers’ Epic Reads even chimed in.
According to the book’s description, “I’m Not Dying with You Tonight follows two teen girls―one Black, one White―who have to confront their own assumptions about racial inequality as they rely on each other to get through the violent race riot that has set their city on fire with civil unrest.”
The video is approaching half a million views on YouTube.