Sharing literature representative of students' diverse experiences opens up conversations, invites inquiry, and develops empathy (Ward & Warren, 2020). It is well documented, however, that these books can be challenging to locate in schools, libraries, and bookstores (Bickmore, Xu, & Sheridan, 2017; Crisp et al., 2016; Jipson & Paley,…

Children's books work to balance many opposing forces. For instance, they are simultaneously written to be read aloud as well as independently and are written for children as well as the adults who purchase and often read them (Nodelman, 2008). Children's books also attempt to impart ideas while avoiding being overtly didactic (Hunt, 1999), yet…

Children's literature scholars have written about the importance of color in the visual texts of picturebooks: Color can establish mood, provide clues to the emotional states of characters, highlight particular objects in illustrations, and signal links between characters and/or objects (e.g., Lewis, 2001; Moebius, 1986; Nodelman, 1988). However,…

The Children's Literature Assembly (CLA) Master Class in the Teaching of Children's Literature session, currently in its 26th year, provides opportunities for those who teach in university settings to share experiences related to teaching children's literature in the university and discuss contemporary trends and issues in the field of children's…

Research has shown that individuals resettled as refugees are represented as passive victims who are dependent on government aid, and are often associated with trauma (MacDonald, 2015; Shapiro & MacDonald, 2017). This should not undermine the traumatic and difficult experiences that people resettled as refugees undergo, but a focus on such…

The year 2019 marks the 25th anniversary of the publication of Eve Bunting's "Smoky Night" (Harcourt, 1994; illustrated by David Diaz). As a Caldecott medal winner, "Smoky Night" is the highest profile picturebook centered on an incident related to police brutality and the profiling of Black citizens--the Los Angeles riots,…

When it comes to being productive allies and co-conspirators with and for transgender people, the authors have been particularly drawn to "George" (Gino, 2015), perhaps the first mass-marketed, #OwnVoices novel with a young transgender protagonist, a White fourth-grade transgender girl named Melissa. This article investigates the…

The current state of homelessness in the United States, the barriers and challenges students who are homeless face, and the prevailing neoliberal construction of homelessness provide the situational context for this study and the discourse within which this analysis of nine children's novels was written. The authors initiated this study with the…

"Metalepsis" is a narrative structural device that increases the complexity of narrative representations by breaching conventional "relationships and hierarchies between characters, texts, authors, illustrators and readers" (McCallum, 2008, p. 181). The focus of this article is how types of metalepsis contribute to the…

This critical content analysis of 116 award-winning English language picture storybooks explores depictions of families in order to identify and question dominant family models. Representations of families must be considered in any diversity analysis to ensure all children are capable of seeing families as they appear in communities. The objective…

"The Hunger Games" (S. Collins, 2008) is one of the best-selling fiction books for young people in the United States (Calta, 2014). Although classified as dystopian literature, "The Hunger Games" is situated within the larger literary category of science fiction, a genre often defined by the presence of strange, yet plausible,…

The Randolph Caldecott Medal is awarded annually by the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC), a division of the American Library Association (ALA). Charged with identifying and honoring the most distinguished American picturebooks annually, the ALSC Board of Directors first awarded the Caldecott Medal in 1938. This article presents a…

A limited number of studies have examined Asian American children's literature over the last half century. While the selection and availability of this literature has increased substantially in the last two decades, many of these texts continue to perpetuate stereotypes (Morgan, 2012), such as the overachieving model minority (Loh-Hagen, 2014) and…

Building on the work of children's literature scholars who are thinking about the intersection of religion and children's literature (Brewbaker, 1983; Dávila, 2015), the author conducted a literature review with two guiding research questions. What methodologies have children's literature scholars used to research religion in texts for young…

Poets Laura Purdie Salas and Janet Wong have known each other for several years, but mostly in an online, task-driven environment, for example, serving on the board of the Children's Literature Assembly (CLA) and cochairing the 2014 CLA Master Class on Poetry Across the Curriculum (Salas et al., 2015). They strengthened their bond by interviewing…