Laura: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Clermont County Public Library’s Booklovers Podcast. I’m your host Laura. And today I’m joined by two librarians with a passion for children’s books. Hey Cara. Hey Stacy. And today they’re going to give us some suggestions about books by BIPOC authors. Welcome to the show!

Cara: [00:00:31] Thank you so much.

Laura: [00:00:32] Cara, you’re going to kick us off?

Books by BIPOC authors

Cara: [00:00:35] Yes, thank you for having us. So, Stacy and I are going to be basing our discussion on a project that we started working on last summer. And it all started when I was approached by a long-time guest who had a college-bound reading list that her son was assigned for school over the summer.

She took a look at it and of course it had all the titles you could think of when you think of classics. I mean, To Kill a Mockingbird, 1984, anything that we think of as a standard was on there. So, it was a pretty lengthy list. But she approached me and said, I’m concerned about this list, especially in light of all the recent current events and movements for equality, like Black Lives Matter.

She said where are all the authors of color- I mean, there were a handful that were on that list, but it’s a very small percentage. She was questioning the validity of that list, which is totally understandable. I knew Stacy would be an awesome collaborator. So I reached out to her for some books and suggestions.

Updating the classics

This is a big project to try to recommend some alternate titles. We decided to write a blog post about BIPOC titles and authors. We’re not necessarily recommending that you do away with the classics. I think they’re always going to be around.

But it’s a way of bringing a much broader view into the discussion of the classics and a much greater perspective.

If you’re not familiar with the term, BIPOC is a newer acronym that stands for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. It’s considered to be more inclusive than previous terms. So that’s what we decided to use for our blog post.

Why update the classics

Stacy contributed half the titles and I contributed half. We just hope that they’re more contemporary voices. A lot of the classics – they’re classics because they’ve been around for a long time. So especially for high school readers, I think they’re a lot less relatable than the books that we chose with contemporary characters. A lot of them are teen characters, which if you’re talking about high schoolers, that’s a lot more relatable to them.

In libraries, we talk about books being windows and mirrors. So you either want people to be able to look into someone else’s life and develop empathy, or to be reflected back something about themselves and help them develop their own identity.

Opening those books up to a wider perspective can only be helpful.

Relatability

Laura: [00:03:23] Yeah. I’m excited because a lot of those classics felt dated when I was reading them 40 years ago. All about a white centered, male centered experience. So I am so glad that you’re offering up alternative suggestions.

Stacy: [00:03:44] Sometimes the language can be off-putting. They’re old, the slang doesn’t make any sense anymore. The jokes don’t make sense anymore. Teens and young adults are just not going to relate to what we think of w...