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hi everybody this will be a quick episode today of the Curious Cat Bookshop podcast as you can probably tell I don't quite have my voice back yet I've actually been sick for almost a month at this point got sick right before New Year's and it's been bad so this will be a very quick episode today what I wanted to do today was to give you some reading recommendations I did a reel a few weeks back where I talked about YA and how much I love it and what I was planning on doing before I kept just being so sick was I was going to do a reel of YA recommendations that are readalikes to Stranger Things and I'm still planning on doing that I have a whole pile of books waiting for us in the bookstore but given current events I felt like it was a bit more important right now for me to talk about a a couple of other things as many of you already know I am a children's book editor as well as the owner of The Curious Cat Bookshop and for the last 15 years of my life I have been building the Tu Books imprint of Lee & Low Books Lee & Low is an independent publisher dedicated to diversity in children's literature they've been around since the early 90s so they just celebrated their 30th anniversary and I started Tu Books as an independent press back in 2009 and it was acquired by Lee & Low in early 2010 and so ever since then I have been first the editorial director and then the publisher of that imprint and then editor at large the last year before I was laid off last fall I felt like today instead of focusing on something fun which we will get to once I have a little bit more breath due to current events I felt like it would be more important for us to talk about how current events though they are making a lot of us pay attention right now are not unprecedented and I've got a few books that I actually edited myself that I wanted to share with you as context for what we're dealing with right now and as a way to share the very painful things that are happening with our young people in a way that will help them to process it and to understand what they can do what their power is and to help us adults to know what we can do and what our power is so I'll start with I am Alfonso Jones this was written by Tony Medina and illustrated by Stacey Robinson and John Jennings with a few people on their team that helped with some penciling as well this is a graphic novel it's a gorgeous beautiful heartbreaking graphic novel the reason why I want to tell you about this is because when we were working on this (in) 2015-2016 it came out in 2017 we all said to each other I really hope that this book doesn't stay on the shelf very long because it becomes irrelevant I hope that we don't have to add anyone to this ancestors wall since this book was published in 2017 far too many names have been added to this wall people who have been murdered by police people who have been murdered by off duty law enforcement officers people who have been murdered by federal agents not just the large number of black and brown people who have been murdered but now we are adding more names to that list who are also white and I I really do hope that that makes people pay attention but I also wish that we had been paying attention when we were discussing Black Lives Matter 10 years ago fifteen years ago people were crying out"Black lives matter" when Trayvon Martin was murdered in I think it was 2012 people started paying attention in Ferguson and we were talking about Ferguson as we wrote this fictional book I am Alfonso Jones is the story of a young man who is murdered by an off duty cop because he's handing a hanger to his friend too many people have been murdered for a phone a hanger just an object in their hand and it follows Alfonso after his death on a subway train in the afterlife and it follows his family and his best friend who was with him who witnessed his death but we not only see that we see his life we see the joy that he had with his mother we see him at school with his friends joking around and learning together and then we see him in the afterlife talking to those who came before him real life people like Amadou Diallo and Eleanor Bumpers this is a book written for teenagers so that they might be able to contextualize our country's long history at being unable to deliver justice it's not just Black Lives Matter though it's also because of how we acquired Texas for example so many Mexican people in Texas at the time that Texas became part of the United States we're indigenous to that land or mixed race indigenous plus all the colonialism that happened in that area of the world Shame the Stars by Guadalupe Garcia Mccall is a really beautiful telling of the Matanza in 1915 and if you don't know what the Matanza was it was basically a reign of terror in Texas in the early 1900s mostly led by the Texas Rangers who ended up being put on federal trial for what they were doing the lynchings that were happening the extrajudicial "repatriations" of Mexican Americans to Mexico if they survived those lynchings the follow up to that book is All the Stars Denied set in the 1930s this is the next generation of the family from Shame the Stars and All the Stars Denied covers a time in Texas where "No dogs or Mexicans" were allowed in the white part of town and the signs were all over the place you've probably heard of Operation W******* in the 1950s Operation (Slur) a slur that I won't say on this video but that wasn't even the first large scale mass deportation event in the United States that would be here in the 1930s and I'm probably missing others because obviously you know this program in the Depression was called"American Jobs for Real Americans" and during this time about 1 million people of Mexican descent including 600,000 American citizens were "repatriated" to Mexico just loaded up on trains and sent to Mexico kidnapped off the street these are fictional but the events that inspired these stories happened in our nation and I think it's important for us to whether we're reading non fiction or fiction right now to know where we come from so that we can understand that the systems that we're seeing right now is not just because of one man at the helm it's because we have created systems in our country and this is not a video about any one white person's culpability today this is a video about how we have created systems in our nation that we have inherited and just like an abusive family situation gets perpetuated generation over generation there is a point at which we have to take responsibility to make it better for the next generation generation after generation after generation we've been dealing with the same problems in our country and reading can help us understand and empathize with our brothers and sisters our siblings who are here indigenously or not so indigenously and understand that it affects all of us and now that we're seeing how it affects all of us I do hope that we might be reading deeply so that we can move that into action in the future I wanna be super excited about reading amazing fantasy and horror that's like Stranger Things I really want to be able to talk with you about all those amazing things too I wanna get better first I wanna be able to have a voice again first but if we want to understand where we are right now it's important to understand where we came from I highly recommend this book by Carol Anderson who is a professor and chair of African American Studies at Emory University in this very readable, fast read of a book, White Rage she talks about how right after the Civil War immediately the backlash the KKK backlash to Reconstruction started and how that played out over the next hundred plus years so in pairing these books we can understand where where we've come from how we got here but not just that I don't even know if this book is still in print anymore this is a book that I read in college for my American history class, at all places BYU, from a lovely amazing professor, Ignacio Garcia who for the first time in my very I wouldn't say sheltered but very every kid is very um self centered for the first time in my life I understood what so many Mexican Americans went through and the reason why their parallel civil rights movement involved the tactics that it did the Chicano school walkout movement in the 60s and 70s was inspired by the civil rights movement every movement builds on itself so right now as we see protests in the street and so many of us are out there trying to do what we can to help our neighbors to make sure that we keep each other safe we have lessons to learn from the people who went before us I don't have I'm here at home today because I'm in the middle of a snowstorm so I don't have um every book that I want to recommend here in my house but anyway this is the stack that I have at home because I am dealing with this giant snowstorm as many of us are across the state across the nation today so this is one stack of books for us to consider as we're trying to contextualize everything that we're dealing with right now my bookstore is in an area of Connecticut that many people tell me oh you're in blue Connecticut you're just fine it's a little bit more 50-50 up in the northwest corner and sometimes I hesitate to share the things that I feel so powerfully about because people in town tell me I shouldn't talk about politics and that I my business will be hurt because of it but I mean to be quite honest we were 40% down at Christmas anyway and I have serious concerns about our sustainability in this town that doesn't mean I don't have plans and we're we just hit monetization our first tier of monetization here on YouTube so that makes me really excited and I have plenty of plans for where we will be going in the future but I have for the last 15 years now 16 cause it's now 2026 I keep forgetting not been afraid to very openly tout my authors because they are amazing and I want you to know how amazing they are too I want you to know that kids can know how to stand up for themselves and that they have the power to make the future a better place by befriending each other and creating community I want you to know the history of Reconstruction and how it affected the next hundred years of our history how we elected Black senators and Black congressmen and then those people were lynched and burned and mass murdered I want you to know how kids all over the world throughout history have been a part of their own liberation both in the 1800s and in World War II I want you to know about indigenous history that we don't learn about in school and the very real traditions that those indigenous people had of their own science their own their own folklore their own beliefs before colonization I want you to know the Vietnamese experience of the Vietnam War from their own perspective but most importantly I want you to know how much fun it is to read a book that is about an adventure a magical experience from a perspective that might not be your own that is what I have been working on for so long and that is why I started a bookstore because I wanted to share all these books with people not just the books that I've worked on but all the wonderful books from people so all around the world how fascinating it is to get to know each other and to have empathy for each other when the hard times hit non fiction can really help us with that but so can fiction so as we deal with current events I just wanted to share some books with you and maybe I got a little carried away but um that's just things that I've been thinking about lately and we'll continue with our very informative podcast once I have a voice again talk to you later
00:00:00.000 --> 00:17:17.965
hi everybody this will be a quick episode today of the Curious Cat Bookshop podcast as you can probably tell I don't quite have my voice back yet I've actually been sick for almost a month at this point got sick right before New Year's and it's been bad so this will be a very quick episode today what I wanted to do today was to give you some reading recommendations I did a reel a few weeks back where I talked about YA and how much I love it and what I was planning on doing before I kept just being so sick was I was going to do a reel of YA recommendations that are readalikes to Stranger Things and I'm still planning on doing that I have a whole pile of books waiting for us in the bookstore but given current events I felt like it was a bit more important right now for me to talk about a a couple of other things as many of you already know I am a children's book editor as well as the owner of The Curious Cat Bookshop and for the last 15 years of my life I have been building the Tu Books imprint of Lee & Low Books Lee & Low is an independent publisher dedicated to diversity in children's literature they've been around since the early 90s so they just celebrated their 30th anniversary and I started Tu Books as an independent press back in 2009 and it was acquired by Lee & Low in early 2010 and so ever since then I have been first the editorial director and then the publisher of that imprint and then editor at large the last year before I was laid off last fall I felt like today instead of focusing on something fun which we will get to once I have a little bit more breath due to current events I felt like it would be more important for us to talk about how current events though they are making a lot of us pay attention right now are not unprecedented and I've got a few books that I actually edited myself that I wanted to share with you as context for what we're dealing with right now and as a way to share the very painful things that are happening with our young people in a way that will help them to process it and to understand what they can do what their power is and to help us adults to know what we can do and what our power is so I'll start with I am Alfonso Jones this was written by Tony Medina and illustrated by Stacey Robinson and John Jennings with a few people on their team that helped with some penciling as well this is a graphic novel it's a gorgeous beautiful heartbreaking graphic novel the reason why I want to tell you about this is because when we were working on this (in) 2015-2016 it came out in 2017 we all said to each other I really hope that this book doesn't stay on the shelf very long because it becomes irrelevant I hope that we don't have to add anyone to this ancestors wall since this book was published in 2017 far too many names have been added to this wall people who have been murdered by police people who have been murdered by off duty law enforcement officers people who have been murdered by federal agents not just the large number of black and brown people who have been murdered but now we are adding more names to that list who are also white and I I really do hope that that makes people pay attention but I also wish that we had been paying attention when we were discussing Black Lives Matter 10 years ago fifteen years ago people were crying out"Black lives matter" when Trayvon Martin was murdered in I think it was 2012 people started paying attention in Ferguson and we were talking about Ferguson as we wrote this fictional book I am Alfonso Jones is the story of a young man who is murdered by an off duty cop because he's handing a hanger to his friend too many people have been murdered for a phone a hanger just an object in their hand and it follows Alfonso after his death on a subway train in the afterlife and it follows his family and his best friend who was with him who witnessed his death but we not only see that we see his life we see the joy that he had with his mother we see him at school with his friends joking around and learning together and then we see him in the afterlife talking to those who came before him real life people like Amadou Diallo and Eleanor Bumpers this is a book written for teenagers so that they might be able to contextualize our country's long history at being unable to deliver justice it's not just Black Lives Matter though it's also because of how we acquired Texas for example so many Mexican people in Texas at the time that Texas became part of the United States we're indigenous to that land or mixed race indigenous plus all the colonialism that happened in that area of the world Shame the Stars by Guadalupe Garcia Mccall is a really beautiful telling of the Matanza in 1915 and if you don't know what the Matanza was it was basically a reign of terror in Texas in the early 1900s mostly led by the Texas Rangers who ended up being put on federal trial for what they were doing the lynchings that were happening the extrajudicial "repatriations" of Mexican Americans to Mexico if they survived those lynchings the follow up to that book is All the Stars Denied set in the 1930s this is the next generation of the family from Shame the Stars and All the Stars Denied covers a time in Texas where "No dogs or Mexicans" were allowed in the white part of town and the signs were all over the place you've probably heard of Operation W******* in the 1950s Operation (Slur) a slur that I won't say on this video but that wasn't even the first large scale mass deportation event in the United States that would be here in the 1930s and I'm probably missing others because obviously you know this program in the Depression was called"American Jobs for Real Americans" and during this time about 1 million people of Mexican descent including 600,000 American citizens were "repatriated" to Mexico just loaded up on trains and sent to Mexico kidnapped off the street these are fictional but the events that inspired these stories happened in our nation and I think it's important for us to whether we're reading non fiction or fiction right now to know where we come from so that we can understand that the systems that we're seeing right now is not just because of one man at the helm it's because we have created systems in our country and this is not a video about any one white person's culpability today this is a video about how we have created systems in our nation that we have inherited and just like an abusive family situation gets perpetuated generation over generation there is a point at which we have to take responsibility to make it better for the next generation generation after generation after generation we've been dealing with the same problems in our country and reading can help us understand and empathize with our brothers and sisters our siblings who are here indigenously or not so indigenously and understand that it affects all of us and now that we're seeing how it affects all of us I do hope that we might be reading deeply so that we can move that into action in the future I wanna be super excited about reading amazing fantasy and horror that's like Stranger Things I really want to be able to talk with you about all those amazing things too I wanna get better first I wanna be able to have a voice again first but if we want to understand where we are right now it's important to understand where we came from I highly recommend this book by Carol Anderson who is a professor and chair of African American Studies at Emory University in this very readable, fast read of a book, White Rage she talks about how right after the Civil War immediately the backlash the KKK backlash to Reconstruction started and how that played out over the next hundred plus years so in pairing these books we can understand where where we've come from how we got here but not just that I don't even know if this book is still in print anymore this is a book that I read in college for my American history class, at all places BYU, from a lovely amazing professor, Ignacio Garcia who for the first time in my very I wouldn't say sheltered but very every kid is very um self centered for the first time in my life I understood what so many Mexican Americans went through and the reason why their parallel civil rights movement involved the tactics that it did the Chicano school walkout movement in the 60s and 70s was inspired by the civil rights movement every movement builds on itself so right now as we see protests in the street and so many of us are out there trying to do what we can to help our neighbors to make sure that we keep each other safe we have lessons to learn from the people who went before us I don't have I'm here at home today because I'm in the middle of a snowstorm so I don't have um every book that I want to recommend here in my house but anyway this is the stack that I have at home because I am dealing with this giant snowstorm as many of us are across the state across the nation today so this is one stack of books for us to consider as we're trying to contextualize everything that we're dealing with right now my bookstore is in an area of Connecticut that many people tell me oh you're in blue Connecticut you're just fine it's a little bit more 50-50 up in the northwest corner and sometimes I hesitate to share the things that I feel so powerfully about because people in town tell me I shouldn't talk about politics and that I my business will be hurt because of it but I mean to be quite honest we were 40% down at Christmas anyway and I have serious concerns about our sustainability in this town that doesn't mean I don't have plans and we're we just hit monetization our first tier of monetization here on YouTube so that makes me really excited and I have plenty of plans for where we will be going in the future but I have for the last 15 years now 16 cause it's now 2026 I keep forgetting not been afraid to very openly tout my authors because they are amazing and I want you to know how amazing they are too I want you to know that kids can know how to stand up for themselves and that they have the power to make the future a better place by befriending each other and creating community I want you to know the history of Reconstruction and how it affected the next hundred years of our history how we elected Black senators and Black congressmen and then those people were lynched and burned and mass murdered I want you to know how kids all over the world throughout history have been a part of their own liberation both in the 1800s and in World War II I want you to know about indigenous history that we don't learn about in school and the very real traditions that those indigenous people had of their own science their own their own folklore their own beliefs before colonization I want you to know the Vietnamese experience of the Vietnam War from their own perspective but most importantly I want you to know how much fun it is to read a book that is about an adventure a magical experience from a perspective that might not be your own that is what I have been working on for so long and that is why I started a bookstore because I wanted to share all these books with people not just the books that I've worked on but all the wonderful books from people so all around the world how fascinating it is to get to know each other and to have empathy for each other when the hard times hit non fiction can really help us with that but so can fiction so as we deal with current events I just wanted to share some books with you and maybe I got a little carried away but um that's just things that I've been thinking about lately and we'll continue with our very informative podcast once I have a voice again talk to you later
