Earlier this year the Children’s Book Council (located in the USA) launched the CBC Diversity Committee in order to:
increase the diversity of voices and experiences contributing to children’s literature. To create this change, 
the Committee strives to build awareness that the nature of our society must be represented within the children’s publishing industry.
We endeavor to encourage diversity of race, gender, geographical origin, sexual orientation, and class among both the creators of and the topics addressed by children’s literature. We strive for a more diverse range of employees working within the industry, of authors and illustrators creating inspiring content, and of characters depicted in children’s literature.
Click here to visit the CBC Diversity Committee Blog and here to access their Resources page which contains information put together by the Committee for anyone interested in producing, promoting, buying, or writing diverse books for children.
Click here to read John A. Sellers’ recent Publisher Weekly article CBC Diversity Committee: Starting Conversations and Building a Following.
Greetings!
To those of you who attended the CBC Diversity Kick Off, thank you! If you were not able to attend last night’s spectacular event, never fear! Detailed below is what you missed. Even if you were in attendance, please be sure to read below for the 7 steps to becoming a CBC Diversity Partner.
The CBC Diversity Committee
The CBC Diversity Committee is dedicated to increasing the diversity of voices and experiences contributing to children’s literature. We endeavor to encourage diversity of race, gender, geographical origin, sexual orientation, and class among both the creators of and the topics addressed by children’s literature. We strive for a more diverse range of employees working within the industry, of authors and illustrators creating inspiring content, and of characters depicted in children’s literature.
We plan to achieve these goals by taking the following actions:
Recruitment
- Participate in high school and college career fairs
- Visit high school senior level English classes to discuss careers in publishing
Resources
- Maintain an up-to-date blog consisting of industry news, book spotlights, CBC Diversity event information, the personal stories of Committee members, and other ready resources for publishing individuals
- Provide a Goodreads CBC Diversity profile that curates front and backlist books by CBC member publishers in order to raise awareness of the diversity-friendly content already in existence
Keeping The Conversation Going
- Host panel discussions at which different industry arms can communicate the challenges they face in selling and promoting diverse books, and can work together to develop solutions to these problems.
- Hold safe space meetings at which industry employees can discuss the obstacles to diversity that they have encountered within the children’s publishing world
Become a Partner
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- Advocate, be proactive, and show your support by adding our Twibbon to your social networking profiles.
- Attend at least on event per year. You may learn something new and benefit from the discussion, enabling you to impart fresh knowledge unto others.
- Acquire and share non-traditional avenues in which to promote diverse books with the CBC.
- Agents and editors-seek diverse books.
- Alert those in sales and marketing to initiate in-house conversations about how to sell and market diverse books.
- Aim to expose children in your life to diverse books and invite your publishing colleagues to talk at their schools about the industry and the jobs within it.
- Acknowledge the CBC as a resource. Check in regularly on the blog and check in with us at
I had such a great time talking to everyone at SCBWI Winter Conference this weekend and teaching the multicultural books breakout. In one of my sessions, we didn’t get to this part of my notes, and for the others, we had to go through the list quickly because it was so long.
One thing we talked about is how the industry itself is working on awareness and furthering diversity among the books themselves and future publishing personnel. Last night, we launched the CBC Diversity Committee, which is working on these goals with other publishing partners. We have a brand-new website (which will gain content as time goes on) and plan a variety of events such as panels discussing diversity, visiting school career days and job fairs, and just continuing the conversation about diversity in all platforms, such as social media. See also some press coverage, where Robin Adelsen, the CBC’s executive director, shares our goals:
To make a difference, we will focus on recruitment by visiting high schools and colleges, providing resources on the CBC Diversity blog and promoting discourse by hosting panel and roundtable discussions.
I also promised attendees of my session that I would share with them the list of questions we discussed that might help us to know what questions to ask when thinking about deep cultural differences, whether we’re talking about writing cross-culturally in the sense of writing from a perspective not our own, or whether we’re thinking about reaching a readership that isn’t entirely our own culture, and if perhaps there might be some ways to express/acknowledge those differences in our writing. In the case of writing from our own cultural perspective, these questions may be less useful, but nonetheless I think they might get us all thinking about how culture affects decisions we make—not as a form of conditioning, at least no more than any other culture, but as a framework by which we interpret the world. Thinking about these questions may help us in our writing as we apply them to characterization, worldbuilding, plot (how a character reacts to certain problems may certainly be affected by cultural attitudes, whether he or she goes with mainstream culture or not, as does how other characters interact with that person, which eventually over the course of a book turns into a sequence of actions that turn into plot), setting, and so forth.
These questions are from chapter 9 of the excellent book A Beginner’s Guide to the Deep Culture Experience: Beneath the Surface by Joseph Shaules. The author was writing to an audience of potential U.S. expats living abroad, with the idea of helping them to think about cultural differences and ways to adapt to their new countries and enjoy the journey, but as I read it, I found so much that is applicable to ways we might think of culture in terms of writing about it, not to mention the adaptation experiences I had living with college roommates from other countries The intercultural experience goes both ways—though I didn’t live in another country, and so my experience wasn’t quite as deep, I still found I had to adapt and learn from my roommates if I wanted to get along with them.
I highl
I had such a great time talking to everyone at SCBWI Winter Conference this weekend and teaching the multicultural books breakout. In one of my sessions, we didn’t get to this part of my notes, and for the others, we had to go through the list quickly because it was so long.
One thing we talked about is how the industry itself is working on awareness and furthering diversity among the books themselves and future publishing personnel. Last night, we launched the CBC Diversity Committee, which is working on these goals with other publishing partners. We have a brand-new website (which will gain content as time goes on) and plan a variety of events such as panels discussing diversity, visiting school career days and job fairs, and just continuing the conversation about diversity in all platforms, such as social media. See also some press coverage, where Robin Adelsen, the CBC’s executive director, shares our goals:
To make a difference, we will focus on recruitment by visiting high schools and colleges, providing resources on the CBC Diversity blog and promoting discourse by hosting panel and roundtable discussions.
I also promised attendees of my session that I would share with them the list of questions we discussed that might help us to know what questions to ask when thinking about deep cultural differences, whether we’re talking about writing cross-culturally in the sense of writing from a perspective not our own, or whether we’re thinking about reaching a readership that isn’t entirely our own culture, and if perhaps there might be some ways to express/acknowledge those differences in our writing. In the case of writing from our own cultural perspective, these questions may be less useful, but nonetheless I think they might get us all thinking about how culture affects decisions we make—not as a form of conditioning, at least no more than any other culture, but as a framework by which we interpret the world. Thinking about these questions may help us in our writing as we apply them to characterization, worldbuilding, plot (how a character reacts to certain problems may certainly be affected by cultural attitudes, whether he or she goes with mainstream culture or not, as does how other characters interact with that person, which eventually over the course of a book turns into a sequence of actions that turn into plot), setting, and so forth.
These questions are from chapter 9 of the excellent book A Beginner’s Guide to the Deep Culture Experience: Beneath the Surface by Joseph Shaules. The author was writing to an audience of potential U.S. expats living abroad, with the idea of helping them to think about cultural differences and ways to adapt to their new countries and enjoy the journey, but as I read it, I found so much that is applicable to ways we might think of culture in terms of writing about it, not to mention the adaptation experiences I had living with college roommates from other countries The intercultural experience goes both ways—though I didn’t live in another country, and so my experience wasn’t quite as deep, I still found I had to adapt and learn from my roommates if I wanted to get along with them.
I highly recommend reading the whole book, or at least chapter 9, where he expands on these questions and discusses how the answers are not either-or, good/bad—just choices that don’t have a value attached to them that show how different people choose to handle universal human questions in different ways.
I was honored to be invited to the Children’s Book Council Diversity Kickoff event tonight!!! It’s such a wonderful and forward-thinking initiative that I asked CBC’s Executive Director, Robin Adelson, to share the vision and thoughts behind forming this committee.
“The newly formed CBC Diversity Committee is dedicated to increasing the diversity of voices and experiences contributing to children’s literature. The committee is charged with shaping an initiative that will focus on increasing diverse representation within the children’s book publishing industry, comprising those people who work in the industry and those authors and illustrators who create the content as well as the characters and stories they represent. To make a difference, we will focus on recruitment by visiting high schools and colleges, providing resources on the CBC Diversity blog and promoting discourse by hosting panel and roundtable discussions. At the kickoff event we will invite attendees to sign on as partners in this initiative and we will list action steps we expect our partners to take.” (Robin Adelson, CBC executive director)
