Cultural Authenticity in Marketing: Terry Farish
The conversation about cultural authenticity in children’s literature and #OwnVoices, painful as it may be, is essential for all writers. The book industry owes readers the honesty of voice and culture and the industry certainly owes creators of color a much, much larger share of the bookshelves. Cultural authenticity has always been deeply ingrained in Curious City’s marketing mission. If books are vehicles for engaging with a culture unlike your own (and books are prefect vehicles of such), the tools Curious City produces to facilitate that engagement should be vetted by that...
Read MoreWhy YA?
Curious City spoke with Chris Lenois on WKVT’s Live & Local about “Why YA?” Why is YA (or Young Adult Literature) on the rise amongst non-teen readers and filling movie screens? Listen to the podcast here. In the discussion I touched on the rise of Dystopian fiction and the harrowing fictional issues of war and destruction in these novels being a “first world problem.” I wrote about this topic for the Vermont College of Fine Arts journal Hunger Mountain in an article entitled, “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine).”...
Read MoreMoonbird and Bunny Ears
Curious City accompanied Phillip Hoose to Harpswell Community TV to record his acknowledgement speech for the YALSA Excellence in NonFiction Award for his book Moonbird: A Year on the Wing with the Great Survivor B95. Passing sunlit coves and stands of pine, we kept an eye out for the tower that would mark America’s last non-digital community station. A map inside the door was marked with red dots showing their transmission range down the pennisulas and up the rolling hills of Downeast Maine. Don, Donna, and Donelle invited us into the studio complete with...
Read MoreI write in blood because…
So many other blogs and individuals carry the important news and releases in the mighty children’s lit universe, so I tend not to. BUT, occasionally there is a something that reaffirms what I so passionately believe–that children’s lit and its creators are the Deliverers of Our Country (thank you E. Nesbit for that title). The brilliant piece from the equally so Sherman Alexie reminds Curious City why we exist and why we continue to muddle on… “…I write books for teenagers because I vividly remember what it felt like to be a teen...
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