Tag: young adult writers

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what's lit

#PublishingPaidMe Reveals Pay Discrepancies Between Black and White Writers

Going into the third week of protests over the police killing of George Floyd, book Twitter went down another road in revealing the racial bias in publishing.

A Blade So Black and A Dream So Dark author L.L. McKinney started the #PublishingPaidMe Twitter hashtag on Saturday to invite White authors to share the advances they received on their books to give Black authors insight on what they received for theirs.

Writer’s Digest shares this definition of an advance versus a royalty:

An advance is a signing bonus that’s negotiated and paid to the author before the book is published. It’s paid against future royalty earnings, which means that for every dollar you receive in an advance, you must earn a dollar from book sales before you start receiving any additional royalty payments.

Though L.L. tweeted she made the hashtag to discover numbers from only White authors, Black authors and other authors of color decided to share their numbers.

One author is Dhonielle Clayton. Her debut fantasy young adult novel The Belles that published in 2018 is seen as inspiration in the multicultural fantasy YA genre. She shared she only received a $45,000 advance for her book though it was in one of the hottest genres at the time amid the publishing industry’s alleged push toward diversity and inclusion with adding more authors of color on their rosters and books featuring characters of color.

In a quote tweet from White YA novelist Laura Sebastian, Zoraida Córdova, who also writes fantasy YA, said she received $7,500 for Labyrinth Lost, which features Latinx characters inspired by her Ecuadorian roots. She added it’s her best-selling book yet. Laura, the author behind the Ash Princess series, tweeted she had received six-figure deals for each book in each of her three trilogies, the next two with debut novels set for 2021.

Laura later tweeted she received backlash for putting up such high numbers and was accused of distributing “sexual favors.” Battling the sexism online, she added she wanted to be an ally and share her reality.

Myriam Gurba, the queer Chicana memoirist behind Mean and the main campaigner to spread awareness on Jeanine Cummins’ White narrative version of the Mexican immigration story in the best-seller American Dirt, said she just earned $3,000 for Mean.

Nigerian-American novelist Nnedi Okorafor who specializes in literature highlighting Africanfuturism and Africanjujuism said she wouldn’t share her numbers but offered the alternative of not taking advances and just receiving royalties. From her tweet, she implies that royalties put more money in her hands in the long run, especially for her award-winning novella trilogy Binti.

The #PublishingPaidMe hashtag is an eye-opening account of how authors who are not White and cisgender may be lowballed for their work, the work readers pay for and check out from libraries, actions that produce a lot of money for publishers.

This conversation may trigger a long-term movement in the publishing industry, where publishers have the opportunity to divide budgets more equally instead of basing sale projections on the myth that diverse stories don’t sell well. Even with the success of books such as Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give and Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Age, that myth still lingers, especially when these Black authors and very few others made news with their advances.

Jesmyn Ward, who won the National Book Award twice, tweeted Monday that her publisher did not want to give her $100,000 for her next book after Salvage the Bones received the award.

Mary Karr, Robinne Lee, and Lilliam Rivera were a few of the authors to respond to Jesmyn’s claims. In a series of tweets, Jesmyn clarifies how her other works fared like Men We Reaped and Sing, Unburied, Sing, which was her first book to earn a $100,000 advance.

L.L. added in multiple tweets that there will be continuation in the discussion where Black authors will be asked to share information.

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what's lit

YA Author Kimberly Jones Explains Civil Unrest Logic in Viral Video

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.

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what's lit

Quarantine Life Lessons From Nicola Yoon’s ‘Everything, Everything’

With most of the U.S. population under some type of stay-at-home measure, it may feel like we’re Madeline Whittier from Nicola Yoon’s 2015 blockbuster young adult novel Everything, Everything. The 17-year-old character stays home her entire life after her doctor mother diagnosed her with severe combined immunodeficiency, meaning she’s allergic to pretty much everything.

Maddy’s illness keeps her indoors all day every day. Her mother takes every precaution to make sure Maddy’s bubble stays clean, with the assistance of Maddy’s home nurse Carla. But once Maddy lays eyes on her new neighbor Olly outside her bedroom window, she questions the lifestyle her mother put her in after her father and younger brother died years before.

Since Maddy stayed inside for 17 years, she has moments in the book that reflect on what many may be experiencing now amid the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.

KEEP THE CONSTANT ONLINE INTERACTION

At the start of the chapter “Secrets,” Maddy expresses how her online communication is reducing her sleep: “My constant IMing with Olly is catching up with me. I fall asleep during not one but two movie nights with my mom. She begins worrying that something’s wrong, that my immune system is compromised somehow.”

As Maddy and Olly mostly depend on online interaction, they exhibit the qualities many people are feeling now with using social media like Instagram Live and videoconferencing tools like Zoom to stay in touch because they can’t see each other in person. Authors are using IG Live to read their works, give writing lessons, and interview each other. Book clubs have found refuge with Zoom to keep their book selections on schedule and continue or start face-to-face meetings.

MAKE FANCY HOME-COOKED DINNERS

The “Menteuse” chapter describes the dinner traditions between Maddy and Pauline, which sometimes include Carla. “Everything at Friday Night Dinner is French. The napkins are white cloth embroidered with fleur-de-lis at the edges. The cutlery is antique French and ornate. We even have miniature silver la tour Eiffel salt and pepper shakers.”

She goes on about how Pauline likes to make cassoulet, “a French stew with chicken, sausage, duck, and white beans.” Except their cassoulet only contains the white beans because of Maddy’s allergies.

One of the conversations that keeps coming up online during the coronavirus isolation is people are either learning to cook or taking pleasure in cooking their own meals. To dress up dinner night, incorporate a theme to keep spirits high at least once a week for yourself or your family.

EXAMINE STRANGE DREAMS

In “My White Balloon,” Maddy describes a dream she had about the house breathing in line with her. On an inhale, walls collapse, but on an exhale, they expand.

According to the World Economic Forum, a sleep expert says the reportedly high rate of vivid dreams people are having during the coronavirus lockdown may be due to information and emotional overload. Maddy is having similar dreams early on in the book when she first sees Olly, which revs her up to find out more about him and how to communicate with him.

MOVE THROUGH THE BOOKSHELF

In “Madam, I’m Adam,” Maddy tells us she returns to a lot of her favorite books: “Sometimes I reread my favorite books from back to front. I start with the last chapter and read backward until I get to the beginning. When you read this way, characters go from hope to despair, from self-knowledge to doubt.”

If you have an obsession to outpace your book consumption with buying more books before finishing most of the ones already on your shelf, then this may be the perfect time to make a dent in your home readership. With physical libraries closed, it makes us value the books we own and revisit the ones we love. More people, not really bibliophiles, have done Marie Kondo makeovers on their bookshelves, so bulking up a skimpy bookshelf can still be done with supporting independent bookstores and checking out library e-books through a mobile device.

Everything, Everything was also made into a motion picture in 2017, starring Amandla Stenberg, Anika Noni Rose, and Nick Robinson.

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book reviews

Book Review: ‘Frankly in Love’ by David Yoon

Frankly in Love (Frankly in Love, #1)Frankly in Love by David Yoon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Frankly in Love by David Yoon, young adult author Nicola Yoon’s husband, is an intricate fictional first-person narrative from a Korean teen boy trying to overcome the subtle racism he was taught because he now finds himself liking a girl he knows his parents would never approve.

Frank Li is a first-generation Korean American teen living in Orange County, California. He starts falling for Brit Means, a white girl at his school. But he knows his strict Korean parents won’t be having that. They even practically disowned their older daughter, who attended Harvard and became an investment banker like she was groomed to do, but to them she canceled all her success by marrying a black man. Even with his best friend Q Lee, who’s black, Frank knows his parents aren’t the most comfortable with Q though they swear they love him like another son because he’s not like “other black people.” With that in his head, Frank decides to recruit his friend, Joy Song, who’s not only Korean but her parents are friends with Frank’s parents, to be his fake girlfriend. She also is hiding who she’s dating, a Chinese boy she knows her parents won’t approve of. While Frank invites Brit to his house with other friends, Brit doesn’t know about the ploy and falls deeper for her new boyfriend. After they exchange “I love you,” Frank is having doubts that he picked the right girl after all.

Frank’s voice is authentic with the constant worrying over race and how his hormones are leading him to someone outside his race then within his race but not within his income bracket. He struggles with how his immigrant parents racially profile everyone like many parents do, especially taking into consideration their American experience and what their parents taught them. The book does a good job in this mental back-and-forth of surveying the meaning of race around the character and seeing it affecting his life in a bad way yet not knowing how to avoid it. His internal monologue, though on the long side, shows what a lot of teens are coping with when it comes to relationships and their parents possibly not being supportive only because of the race of the partner they choose.

Some book reviews discuss the book’s length, and yes it’s too long and has the character going through a lot during his senior year on top of worrying about his love life, dealing with his parents, and trying to get into college. The beginning of the book is very long with over-describing his life and that same rhythm returns at the end, as in there are few times you think the book will end but it keeps going. It needed better editing when it came to length.

Overall, the book handles mixed-race relationships among teens well and how even today they may be dealing with heavier racial issues because they’re hearing their parents discuss race in a negative way. In this book, Frank becomes a bit obsessed analyzing race in his world, but he’s developing his viewpoints around cultural expectations and trying to figure out love in the process. Also listened to this story on audiobook where the narrator’s voice works except when he did the girls’ voice, which came out comical, but it’s a likeable audio read.

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what's lit

Ibi Zoboi Talks Writing Process With Yusef Salaam in New YA Book

Award-winning young adult author Ibi Zoboi and Dr. Yusef Salaam shared their writing process on their upcoming YA book.

On Instagram Live Wednesday, Ibi explained how she infused her writing into Yusef’s poetry in Punching the Air. It tells the story of 16-year-old Amal Shahid, a Black Muslim teen pursuing poetry and art, who finds himself in prison after “an altercation in a gentrifying neighborhood escalates into tragedy,” according to the publisher HarperCollins Publishers.

During the video chat, Ibi wore a T-shirt printed with art by Yusef that he named “Born Brave” and had designed while wrongfully convicted for seven years over the 1989 rape of a White female jogger. He was a part of the Central Park Five, the group of four Black teens and one Latino teen blamed for the infamous crime. They became known as the Exonerated Five after filmmaker Ava DuVernay brought their story to Netflix last year in When They See Us. The group was exonerated in 2002 after the identity of the real rapist was discovered. Yusef was 15 when he went to jail.

While in jail, Yusef found ways to create art and poetry with the tools he could find like a pin in his clothes.

“Art is a completely liberating meditative process,” he said in the chat. “When you get the opportunity to delve into it and be free with it, you don’t really know where it’s going to go. And the beauty of it is when you finish coming out of the meditation and see what you’ve created, it’s like, ‘Wow.'”

Attendees were allowed to ask questions, and the first question focused on how Ibi and Yusef co-wrote the book.

“I’m the writer and Yusef is the storyteller in this situation,” Ibi said. “It was collaborative in the storytelling process, and I could not have written this book without Yusef’s input and Yusef’s history and Yusef’s mindset.”

She said while Yusef was busy promoting When They See Us she was hard at work. “While he was doing that, I was typing away and really having conversations with him, so in that sense he was the storyteller and I was the writer and transcriber, and Yusef was giving me ideas.”

Though they didn’t go into detail about the specific crime that leads Amal to trouble, the co-authors said the crime is inspired by their upbringings in segregated 1980s New York. They also said they didn’t want to apply Yusef’s real story to the novel.

Ibi and Yusef said they were inspired by the 1989 murder of Yusuf Hawkins, a Black teen, who was killed by a White teen mob in the predominantly White section of Bensonhurst in Brooklyn after inquiring about a car for sale with his friends. His group was mistaken for another group going to a birthday party of a girl one of the White boys had a relationship with.

The authors also recalled the Jena Six case of six Black teens in Jena, Louisiana who had beaten a White classmate in 2006. The incident followed a Black teen at their local high school trying to sit in a part of the courtyard reserved for White kids. The Jena Six received attention from civil rights leaders after they had been heavily charged with attempted murder and conspiracy to commit murder. Since this incident occurred before social media took off, Ibi said we tend to have a collective amnesia about racially charged events.

“I was scared to write this story, but I knew I could lean on you,” Ibi told Yusef. “I couldn’t have never written this story without you at all. One of things I asked you is whether or not you were OK with me as a woman telling this story and do you remember what you told me?”

“Absolutely,” Yusef said. “I don’t remember exactly what I told you, but there’s a certain power from a woman telling a story that can’t be not from a woman. I’m thinking about my mother as a nurturer. I’m thinking about Ava DuVernay as a master storyteller, who can take something out of the world …. I want to say I was so blessed to be able to have you in that space.”

Ibi and Yusef met in 1999 while they were both attending Hunter College in New York. American Street, Ibi’s debut novel, was a National Book Award finalist. She also wrote the YA novel Pride, a Pride and Prejudice remix, and the middle grade novel My Life as an Ice Cream Sandwich. She edited the YA anthology Black Enough: Stories of Being Young & Black in America.

Punching the Air is being recommended to readers who like Jason Reynolds, who made an appearance in the Instagram Live stream, along with fellow YA novelist Nic Stone.

The book is scheduled to come out Sept. 1. The authors said in the chat that they plan to do a book tour, but no news yet on if it will be in-person or virtual.

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book reviews

Book Review: ‘On the Come Up’ by Angie Thomas

On the Come Up by Angie Thomas
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

On the Come Up by Angie Thomas follows a teenage girl through her rise in the local rap game as she learns to navigate her emotions around a traumatic event at her high school. Like Angie’s debut novel The Hate U Give, this story features a black teen girl trying to overcome obstacles in the fictional Garden Heights.

The daughter of the late rap legend Lawless, Bri is 16 and hungry to jump-start her rap career. Her Aunt Pooh becomes her unofficial agent by hooking Bri up with a chance at the main rap battle competition in the city. Once she steps up into the ring, Bri feels her nerves until the rapper across from her, Milez, disses her father. She never knew her father, but she knows he deserves the respect of every rapper in Garden Heights. She transfers that anger into her rhymes, emerging as the winner. She soon learns her competitor is the son of Lawless’ manager, Supreme. And Supreme sees the opportunity to make Bri a star. While riding the wave of future stardom, Bri is slammed against the floor at her school by two white security guards. As one of a few students of color at the historically white performing arts school, Bri knows she walks in those hallways with her skin color being seen as a threat. She takes that frustration and puts it into a song. Aunt Pooh warns Bri not to release that faux gangster front song, but when Aunt Pooh disappears, Bri decides to upload the song online. It goes viral but brings up a lot of negative attention Bri was not ready for.

The story is a great follow-up to The Hate U Give with a magnified focus on hip-hop and the lifestyles the musicians feel they have to assume due to stereotypes. Bri lives in the black underdeveloped neighborhood of Garden Heights with her Aunt Pooh, who’s in the gang Garden Disciples, and her father being murdered in the streets while at the top of his game because he was faking the lifestyle of being a hardened, weapon-strapped gangster. The juxtaposition of knowing who you are and knowing who others think you are follows Bri while other characters like Bri’s mother Jayda and Milez try to rise above the stereotypes. The school incident is unfortunately becoming viral with many kids of color being thrown to the ground by a white teacher or staffer over a disciplinary issue. Again, Angie weaves a racially charged issue into her book like the shootings of unarmed black people in The Hate U Give.

Overall, this is another hypnotic read from the author that dives deep into a realistic story that’s rare to find in today’s young adult literature.

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what's lit

Women Authors Attack Sarah Dessen Critic in Social Media Uproar

Burst

This past week, young adult author Sarah Dessen tweeted a quote from a college article by a woman who campaigned against her books in a campus reading program years ago. Many authors including Roxane Gay and Siobhan Vivian came to Sarah’s defense—until fans clapped back when the woman was being called derogatory names by top women authors. The authors backpedaled with some Twitter users accusing Sarah of white female victimhood and the authors of attacking readers with opinions on their works.

As of the weekend, the discriminatory tweets have disappeared from top authors’ Twitter feeds, including Siobhan Vivian, author of YA book We Are the Wildcats, who tweeted “Fuck that fucking bitch” about the quoted woman with Sarah saying “I love you” back.

Dhonielle Clayton, author of multicultural fantasy YA novel The Belles and co-founder of We Need Diverse Books, called the quoted woman a “raggedy ass fucking bitch.” Tiffany Jackson, author of YA novels Allegedly and Monday’s Not Coming, agreed. Siobhan’s Twitter account doesn’t exist anymore and her professional website has been made private, and Dhonielle’s account, which was very active with thousands of followers and tweets, now only has tweets from Nov. 14.

The Nov. 12 article in question came from The Aberdeen News on Northern State University’s Common Read program. Brooke Nelson, now a master’s degree student, says in the article:

“She’s fine for teen girls. But definitely not up to the level of Common Read. So I became involved simply so I could stop them from ever choosing Sarah Dessen.”

Brooke, according to the article, helped with the 2017 selection, which became Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson, a memoir by a civil rights lawyer in pursuit of justice which will be a movie starring Michael B. Jordan and Jamie Foxx. Sarah’s 2016 novel Saint Anything was in the running, a Vulture article reported. After Sarah mentioned the criticism in the infamous now-deleted tweet, the university issued an apology on Twitter in support of Sarah and against the free speech of an alum. Even the reporter apologized for adding the quote.

https://twitter.com/kgrandstrandAAN/status/1194307799385300998?s=20

The Washington Post was one of the first news outlets to see the Twitter feud unfold. The reporter interviewed Brooke, who said the quote was taken out of context with her emphasizing she didn’t think Sarah’s book was appropriate as a top book for her college crowd, and asked for her input:

Nelson, for her part, said she hopes the controversy draws more people to read books that will encourage them to think critically about pressing social issues.

“If anything comes out of this larger conversation,” Nelson told The Post, “I hope it is that others will make it a point to read books like [‘Just Mercy’] that push them beyond their usual perspective and challenge their assumptions of society.”

https://twitter.com/sarahdessen/status/1195431073892749315

https://twitter.com/rgay/status/1195405484905250817

https://twitter.com/pronounced_ing/status/1195742500369162240

https://twitter.com/jodipicoult/status/1195744857047928840

https://twitter.com/jenniferweiner/status/1195470675034685441

https://twitter.com/nkjemisin/status/1195745641768652800

Not everybody is going to like your book. And sometimes like in Sarah’s case, your book may be heavily scrutinized in some scenarios, even in a small-town news story about a small-town university’s book program. This comes with the territory.

Also, this story shows even as outspoken writers you have to be careful about what you decide to share publicly. Social media is an important asset to connecting with fans and readers, and now some of the authors involved have chosen to start over or take a break while most just deleted the first tweet in support of Sarah and tweeted an apology instead.

Ignore the haters if you don’t have anything nice to say; if it’s threatening in any way, then report the tweet and block the user, but just breathe when you see something constructive that you don’t like. Let it go, and if someone asks about the criticism, don’t respond or say something diplomatic because at the end of the day not everyone is going to like your work and they have the right to say so.

The unfortunate Twitter saga has some followers promoting a boycott, so we’ll keep a watch on how the authors involved will be impacted. Earlier this year, Netflix announced making three of Sarah’s novels into films.

https://twitter.com/Felicity_M2/status/1195602749959933952