Yes Indeed!

Check out this article from the Huffington Post entitled, 'Here Are The Most Popular Books Of 2013 From The Nation's Top-Ranked Library'.  Guess what?  A Street Literature book is among the most circulated during the 2013 calendar year throughout libraries within the Chicago Public Library system.

Who said Street Lit. wasn't a genre?  I think it's time for the critics to accept that this genre isn't going anywhere.

Harold Washington Library Center

Bluford Series on Go Readers

     I just loooooovvvvve Paul Langan, author of the popular Bluford Series for pre-teens and teens. He has cleverly created a audiobook player called Go Reader.  Each volume contains five novels in the popular Bluford series and is a must buy for your library media center program.  This is great because my reluctant/struggling readers can enjoy the twenty books in this wonderful series with their classmates.  So far, the students absolutely love the Go Readers!   #BossLibrarianChronicles#libraries #librarians

http://authorpaullangan.weebly.com/biography.html

The Bluford Series Is Very Traditional

Special thanks to author Dr. Vanessa Irvin Morris, author of the popular Street Literature blog and The Reader's Advisory Guide to Street Literature for posting this interview of author Paul Langan!

For those who are critical of the popular Bluford Series (Townsend Press), please read the following response.  In a 2011 New York Times interview, author Paul Langan explains why tweens and teens are so drawn to his books.  It's time to wake up everyone and recognize our tweens and teens need to read stories that reflect themselves, neighborhoods and challenges in their lives.

New Bluford Series releases, "Promises to Keep" and "Survivor" by Paul Langan

This portrait of the Bluford Series is incomplete. While the series does depict tough issues that urban teens encounter in their lives, there is much much more going on.

The Bluford Series celebrates family, friendship, and civility. Characters in the books are complex human beings, not stereotypes or caricatures. They are vulnerable and insecure. They have fears and anxieties as well as strengths. Some are honor students; others are caretakers for their siblings or ill grandparents. A few work to support their families while also going to school. All of them face difficulties that young people encounter in their lives. Each must wrestle to make good choices even when those choices are not popular or easy or obvious. Readers can relate to this; they do it everyday - or at least they try to.

Watch kids reading the series, and you will see young people concentrating on complex moral questions. You will see them comparing what they read to what they have experienced. You will see them on the edge of their seats rooting for a character to save a peer, help a family member, or avoid a pitfall. In short, you will see young readers absorbed in the written word. This is why the Bluford Series exists: to get kids reading - to give them that magic experience of being totally absorbed in a book.

To achieve this, I made choices to keep the books meaningful, relevant, and exciting. But at the core, the Bluford Series is very traditional. It speaks to issues of the heart - only in this case that heart includes diverse teens, an audience often on the outside looking in when it comes to books.

Lockwood Lions Series

Saddleback Publishing has a new series that will appeal to teens who enjoy reading Street Literature.  The Lockwood Lions series focuses on a group of teens and the drama that they experience at their local high school.  Peer pressure, dating, parents and fitting in are the common themes presented by popular author Stephanie Perry Moore.

What makes this book series a little different is that all of the books are 'flip books.'  These flip books provide readers with a point of view from two sides - the cheer squad and the football team.   I think it's really cute how Moore has nicknamed the points of view, 'The Swag and The Cheer Drama."  So, if the teen wants to read about a different point of view, they just flip the book!  Students love it because every story has two sides:  girl and boy points of view.  So far, I can't keep the few copies I have on the shelf.  This book series is a nice addition to the YA Street Literature club.  This is a fairly new book series so you may have to have your book seller/distributor order the books directly from Saddleback Publishing.

Whitewashing: A Dirty Practice

I will be the first to admit it:  I have Google Alerts setting and rarely have time to read the daily posts.  I know its a shame but there's just not enough hours in the day.  I can't tell you how many times my Blackberry buzzes everyday from a alert, blog post, facebook comment or twitter 'tweet' and I haven't even mentioned number of text mesages, emails or voicemails.  Recently, one of the alerts caught my attention was from  http://www.racebending.com/, a website dedicated to the advocacy of fair casting in television and film. One of the recent posts, 'Whitewashing in Young Adult Literature' - http://www.racebending.com/v3/featured/whitewashing-in-young-adult-lit/ really made me think about the practices of the publishing industry.

'Whitewashing' takes place when publishing companies deliberately do not use ethnic models to market a book about a particular ethnic group.  This practice sounds very familiar to me.  In 1995, my master's thesis entitled, "African-Americans and the Mass Media:  The Images that Convey's Messages" I focused on how advertising companies failed to use people of color to market products.  Though I didn't not use the term 'Whitewashing' to describe what was taking place then, I believe it is the same practice today.  A recent example of 'Whitewashing' took place when Bloombury Press decided to use a model that was not African-American on the cover of 'Liar' by Justine Larbalestier.   The main character of the novel is a teenage African-American girl.  As you can see below, there are three versions of the cover art for this book.

When the author Justine Larbalestier questioned the publisher about this decision, she was informed of the following:

     "Editors have told me that their sales departments say black covers don’t sell.   Sales reps have     told me that many of their accounts won’t take books with black covers.   Booksellers have told me that they can’t give away YAs with black covers.   Authors have told me that their books with black covers are frequently not shelved in the same part of the library as other YA—they’re exiled to the Urban Fiction section—and many bookshops simply don’t stock them at all."

  I totally disagree with this statement from Bloomsbury Press. 

Racism continues to run rampant in the publishing industry.  The Bloomsbury Publishing statement implies that teens won't read across genres when actually they do.  Moreover, there is a undelying statement that African-American kids don't read when in realitity, this group is specifically looking for books that reflect themselves in appearance, personal experiences and neighborhoods.  What also annoys me is the practice of some booksellers (chain and independent) often times 'catagorize' all African-American literature as 'Urban Fiction' and some then strategically locate this section in the front of the store - next to the cashiers (please don't get me started!).   Furthermore, I believe that there is a 'laziness' on the part of key people in the YA or adult publishing industry to make the time to differenciate between the the genres and the reluctancy to promote these books.  

The 'Whitewashing in Young Adult Literature' post also recognizes that this is not just a African-American issue but multi-cultural as well.  The Asian community has long had a history of their books changed to 'reach a broader audience' for years.  Read more about the struggle in the Asian publishing industry by reading 'The YA YA YA's' - July 2009 post:  http://theyayayas.wordpress.com/2009/07/27/asian-americans-on-ya-fiction-covers/.  

Both posts were well written and I hope you will find them thoughtprovoking as I did.  Both http://theyayayas.wordpress.com/ and http://www.racebending.com/v3/  are cool blogs and now included in my googlereader account for future reading.  

Until next time, K.C.