I had four minutes to talk about my newest picture book, We Sing From the Heart, with my publisher, Angus Yuen-Killick of Red Comet Press, on the SLJ Webcast showcasing The Best of the Best from Small Presses: Picture Books for Fall. Angus and I met separately to practice our portion. It’s harder than you…
I am part of Authors Against Banned Books and in our most recent meeting, we all wanted to take an action step to fight against banned and challenged books. One suggestion was to raise awareness of affected books in your state so here is my list which I got from the Boston Public Library. I…
This list is curated from Advancing Justice’s list of BANNED: An Asian American Reading List of Banned Books in 2023 on Medium. Let’s all read these books and request them at your local library to support Asian American authors! 22 Banned Asian American Children’s Books Red Kite, Blue Kite by Jiang Ji-li, illustrated…
“If the plantation owners of the South, Jackson’s people, were to have the land they wanted to grow more cotton, the Choctaws had to move,” I said. “And if you, Chief Pushmataha, were so against this move, you must be gone, out of the way.” from When A Ghost Talks, Listen by Tim Tingle …
2017 marks the 50th anniversary of the landmark case that made mixed-race marriages legal. It’s hard to imagine that mixed-race marriages were illegal until quite recently. What is the outcome of making mixed-race marriages legal? Anti-miscegenation laws or miscegenation laws are laws that enforce racial segregation at the level of marriage and intimate relationships by…
What amazes me the most is that I grew up in Seal Beach, California, one town over from Westminster, where Sylvia Mendez and Aki Munemitsu both lived. When Aki and her family were forced to leave their farm during WWII and live incarcerated at internment camps, a banker helped her family lease their land so…
“This history was totally hidden from white children. And that was deliberate.” from The Atlantic I think that the Tulsa Race Massacre may have garnered a single sentence in my history book when I studied A.P. History in high school in Southern California. A single sentence or even paragraph isn’t enough to do it justice,…