Oh MG News

KidLiteracy, Inc. is a brand new non-profit organization dedicated to bringing writers and books to schools in need. Check them out here, follow them on Facebook, and consider donating to this wonderful new effort to bring literacy to all children everywhere. If you’re an author, illustrator, or publisher, you can sign up online to work with KidLiteracy, Inc. And if you’re a school in NE Florida, go to the website to sign up for a free author visit! Congratulations and best of luck to the group’s founders: our own Jen Swanson, along with her partners Karen Cherney and Sophia Gholz.

Cover Reveals: From the Mixed-Up Files now does cover reveals. If you’re an author with a cover reveal to share, consider working with us to host your big day. To be considered, please write us: msfishby@mixedupfiles.com, let us know your publisher and your time frame. We’re sorry, but we don’t host self-published covers.

Happy First Day of Spring! We at MUF are celebrating with some wonderful news: our blog has been selected by the panelists at Feedspot as one of the Top 15 Tween Blogs on the web! Will you help us spread the word? Tweet or Instagram our great news with the hashtags #mg, #blogs, #parents, #teachers, and #homeschooling – and tell us why you read MUF. We’re so grateful for your support.

National Read Across America Day: On Monday, March 4, classrooms across the nation will celebrate the birthday of Theodor Geisel — otherwise known as Dr. Seuss — synonymously with Read Across America Day. The annual reading event, created by the National Education Association in 1997, intended to unite classrooms across America in a celebration of reading.

Celebrating Dr. Seuss these days, however, is not without its challenges. A growing body of analysis has posited evidence of racism in the iconic picture books, and invited a deeper scrutiny of characters that have been part of the cultural fabric of decades of children. The most recent study, The Cat is Out of the Bag: Orientalism, AntiBlackness, and White Supremacy in Dr. Seuss’ s Children’s Books, comes from St.Catherine University’s Research on Diversity in Youth Literature. The authors, Katie Ishizuka and Ramon Stephens, considered texts such as The Sneetches and Horton Hears a Who, long thought to be parables promoting tolerance. “Our study sought to evaluate the claims that his children’s books are anti-racist, and was shaped by the research question: How and to what extent are non-White characters depicted in Dr. Seuss’ children’s books?”

Among their findings:

• Roughly 98% of Dr. Seuss’s human characters are White and mostly male
• “Males of color are only presented in subservient, exotified, or dehumanized roles.” (Ishizuka and Stephens)
• “Most startling is the complete invisibility and absence of women and girls of color across Seuss’ entire children’s book collection.” (Ishizuka and Stephens)

In 2017, the NEA responded to the heightened awareness of racial bias in Dr. Seuss’s work by moving toward a more generally themed celebration of diversity in children’s literature and a goal of reading year round.