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We’re GrowingLit!

GrowingLit is a children’s book publisher with a mission to tell stories that are not always told, so that every child can feel included, seen, understood, and supported. Our goal is to publish beautiful books and resources that thoughtfully reenvision the literary canon while inspiring children and their caregivers to imagine and engage at home and in their communities.

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The Need for Diverse Kid-Lit

In 2014, celebrated and award-winning author Walter Dean Myers, whose work includes hundreds of children’s books that depict Black and Brown characters, asked, in an essay for The New York Times, “Where Are the People of Color in Children’s Books?” Soon thereafter, a group of activist-authors started the hashtag #WeNeedDiverseBooks as a response to an all-white and all-male BookCon panel on children’s books. Scholar and educator Ebony Elizabeth Thomas reminds us that “Stories Still Matter” as she connects this recent movement for diversity in children’s literature, both in content and in industry context, to earlier movements for diverse kidlit from as early as the Victorian era to the civil rights movement in the ‘60s to the organization, activism, creation and celebration seen as part of today’s We Need Diverse Books campaign. Recently, the Cooperative Children’s Book Center, which has been collecting data on diversity in children’s books since 1985, found that, “[t]aken together, books about white children, talking bears, trucks, monsters, potatoes, etc. represent nearly three quarters (71%) of children’s and young adult books published in 2019.” Despite the progress in diversifying kids-lit, there is more work to be done–which is why we are GrowingLit.

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