Betsy and Kate can say with complete confidence that this is the first picture book about a Black kid on the autism spectrum either have ever seen. Recently Kate saw a list from Black Education Matters listing several books that featured Black children with disabilities and she asked Betsy if any were possible for the podcast. And lo and behold, My Brother Charlie is ten years old this year. That's ten years younger than we usually permit for a podcast, but when the topic is as important as this, we make exceptions to the rules.

Show Notes:

If you have a chance, please consider reading the AERA (American Educational Research Association) April-June 2017 edition article Understanding the Puzzle Behind the Pictures: A Content Analysis of Children’s Picture Books About Autism. The article is a good encapsulation of some of the issues with this particular book: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2332858417701682

Now as Betsy mentioned on the show, she thought it might be a good idea to include a video of the authors talking about this book. What she did not expect to encounter in literally the first second was a quote from a man who makes it INFINITELY clear that 2010 was not 10 years ago. It was 10 million years ago. See what we mean: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3sBYYGQcnw

If you would like to read the full text of Stephanie Lucianovic's Zoom of the Flies tweets, you can find them here, including the coda: https://twitter.com/grubreport/status/1303795901194854400

For the full Show Notes please visit: http://blogs.slj.com/afuse8production/2020/09/14/fuse-8-n-kate-my-brother-charlie-by-holly-robinson-ryan-elizabeth-peete-ill-shane-w-evans/