Children’s & YA Literature

Past Editor: Marah Gubar

Digging up Whiteness

We may imagine that young people are innocent of the implications of race and class in American culture, that they can grow up in a kind of bubble of protection, safely insulated from the vexed and ...

Baldwin’s Children

James Baldwin’s recently reissued picture book, Little Man, Little Man, positions itself within a larger textual world. In this sweet and lively story of four-year-old TJ and his friends on a summer ...

Power, Poison, Pain, and Joy

Sitting atop a police car beneath an oversized American flag, Kendrick Lamar opened the 2015 BET awards with his single “Alright.” “We hate the po-po ...

The Earnest Elfin Dream Gay

The guy behind the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” phenomenon has regrets. In a 2007 review of Elizabethtown, film critic Nathan Rabin coined this term to contextualize ...

The YA Resistance

With tedious regularity, cultural commentators turn up their noses at Young Adult fiction, grumbling that it allows readers who should know better to indulge in “escapism, instant gratification, and ...

Empathy Is Not Enough

Almost 30 years ago, education researcher and children’s literature scholar Rudine Sims Bishop introduced an analogy that has been widely embraced by the librarians, teachers, artists, and scholars ...

Teaching Kids to Resist

Do you know who Fred Korematsu is? He is not yet a household name like Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King Jr., despite the integral role he played in protesting the incarceration of Japanese Americans ...

Picturing Freedom

Freedom Over Me: Eleven Slaves, Their Lives and Dreams Brought to Life by Ashley Bryan enriches a fragmentary archive by tapping into something we know for sure about the enslaved but seldom allow ourselves to explore ...