The One With Making Space With Open Mic

This month, I'm participating in the Slice of Life challenge with Two Writing Teachers. If you want to participate, you can link up at their Slice of Life Story Post or you can head on over there to check out other people's stories and follow along with the fun. For more information on what a Slice of Life is about, you can go here. 

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Maybe you've read Mike Jung's post, No More All-Male Panels: a pledge in solidarity with #kidlitwomen, and Laurel Snyder's post,  No More All-White Panels: A PLEDGE. Mike calls for males in kidlit to pledge to not participate in all-male panels and Laurel calls for everyone in kidlit to pledge to not participate in all-white panels. Both of these are examples of how kidlit creators are working to make space for voices that haven't had an equitable opportunity in the past. I'm glad they are bringing attention to this and asking others to pay attention to this. 

This sends the message:

I believe in women and people of color. 

I believe in their stories, their ideas, their voices.

I believe in making space for women and people of color to use their voices. 

I hope and believe it also means, 

I believe in people from other underrepresented groups such as but not limited to people who are LGBTQIA, who have disabilities, and who are Native American. 

Making space is important. 

It's not about finding our voices, it's about having the opportunity to share our voices and for our voices to be heard. 

For me, bringing open mic to our middle school is a way I can help make space for student voices. Young people need to know their voices matter. 

Last May, I took my older son to hear Representative John Lewis and Andrew Aydin speak about their graphic novel book series, March. They shared how it came to be that John Lewis helped created a graphic novel and in telling this story, they talked about The Montgomery Story and how John Lewis remembers being inspired by this comic. He also shared how important young people were in the Civil Rights Movement and how important young people still are as activists today. In fact, when it came time to answer questions, John Lewis would only take questions from young people in the audience.

Young people matter and their words matter. That's why bringing open mic and spoken word to students is so exciting to me. Open mic gives students countless ways to express ourselves. It can be whatever it needs to be but in its simplest form, open mic is the opportunity to weave words together to share a message. 

I'm not a good singer so writing lyrics and singing a song is not my thing but the simplicity in spoken word allows for me to get up and share my voice however they want. (In saying this I really don't mean it's easy to write words, share your truth, perform in front of others, but I mean simplicity in the sense that it doesn't require having to carry a tune or to play an instrument.) This is part of the beauty of open mic. Anyone can join, everyone is invited.

I hope having an open mic sends the message: 

I believe in young people. 

I believe in their stories, their ideas, their voices.

I believe in making space for young people to use their voices. 

I believe.

POC Fall In Love Too

     I consider myself lucky that my office is in the library at the middle school where I work. When students come in to look for books, I often find myself talking to them about books, suggesting books, or helping them find books. If you know me at all, you know how much fun this is for me!

     This week a student came in looking for a book. I asked her if I could help her find anything specific and she said no, she was just looking at books to see if she found something she liked. 

     "What was the last book you read that you liked?" I asked her. 

     "Everything Everything," she explained. "And then I saw the movie this weekend." She liked the movie and thought they did a good job even though some parts were different from the book. 

     I asked, "What did you like about Everything Everything?"

     She paused. And then she admitted, "The romance."

via GIPHY

     I squeed. That's the only and best word to describe my reaction. 

     It's not often that a student comes in looking for romance and it happens to be my favorite genre. I've read all the books in The Princess Diaries series, all the books in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series, tons of Sarah Dessen, Stephanie Perkins, Elizabeth Eulberg, John Green, Jordan Sonnenblick, and David Levithan. 

     Aisle to aisle, I scanned the shelves, thinking of some of my favorites, spotting others that stood out to me, handing them to the student until she had a stack to look through. 

     Not one of them featured a person of color as a protagonist.

     There is a Latinx character in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants...but it hit me right in the gut that I didn't have a book to give her that was about a person of color falling in love. Maybe if I had taken a little more time to search, I would have come up with one but none stood out to me as I went through the stacks.

    In the last year or so I've read Yaqui Delgado Wants To Kick Your Ass, Gabi, A Girl In Pieces, Piecing Me Together, The Hate U Give, and Always and Forever, Lara Jean, the third book in Jenny Han's To All The Boys I've Loved Before series and Always and Forever, Lara Jean is the only one that truly stands out to me as a contemporary young adult romance....though there are elements of romance in others. 

     Obviously, I'm aware of the We Need Diverse Books campaign and the need for people of color to be represented more in children's and young adult literature. I get it. But when I had a student standing in front of me wanting to read one of my favorite genres and I couldn't come up with more than one or two books with a protagonist who was a person of color, I wanted to cry.

     People of color fall in love just like white people fall in love.

     We fall in love too.

     We need more romance books with people of color as the protagonists.

     Now I'm on a mission to find contemporary young adult romance books with protagonists who are people of color for this student and for myself. I'm going to buy books if I have to but I'm determined to give her books that feature protagonists who are people of color.

Rich In Color has a list of YA Reads with POC-Centric Romances and I compiled a list here from my research of recently published or soon to be published. I haven't read any of these yet so if you have any thoughts to share on these or others I should add, please share in the comments. 

Everything Everything by Nicola Yoon

Let's Talk About Love by Claire Kann

A Girl Like That by Tanaz Bhathena

In Search of Us by Ava Dellaira

The Beauty That Remains by Ashley Woodfolk

The Way You Make Me Feel by Maurene Goo

When Dimple Met Rishi by Sandhya Menon

Meet Cute: Some People Are Destined to Meet with stories by Jennifer L. Armentrout, 

Sona Charaipotra, Dhonielle Clayton, Katie Cotugno, Jocelyn Davies, 

Nina LaCour, Emery Lord, Katharine McGee , Kass Morgan, Meredith Russo, 

Sara Shepard, Nicola Yoon, Ibi Zoboi, Julie Murphy

Love, Hate and Other Filters by Samira Ahmed

King Geordi the Great by Gene Gant

The Education of Margot Sanchez by Lilliam Rivera

I Am Thunder by Muhammad Khan

American Panda by Gloria Chao

Down and Across by Arvin Ahmadi

That Thing We Call A Heart by Sheba Karim

Again, I haven't read any of these books so please let me know if there is one here I should bump to the top of my stack to read or others I should add!

*Update*

Suggested titles from Twitter:

You Bring The Distance Near by Mitali Perkins

I Believe In A Thing Called Love by Maurene Goo

Solo by Kwame Alexander

The Sun Is Also A Star by Nicola Yoon
Fire In The Streets by Kekla Magoon