Racism impacts various facets of the lives of people of color (POC) in the United States, spanning across historical and contemporary contexts. Chinese Americans, as an ethnic group historically excluded from entering the United States and denied naturalized citizenship, have endured distinctive and enduring forms of racism that are…

When we considered how current sociopolitical events may impact experiences of girlhood today and remembered our own lived girlhood experiences, we came to the collective realization that we often turned to books as a way to make sense of our liminal experiences during girlhood. Given the sociopolitical moment in which we are living and…

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…

The disproportionate impact of environmental degradation on First Nations peoples and on other communities of color is not new. Indigenous peoples, Black people, and other marginalized communities experience the consequences of environmental degradation disproportionately (Taylor, 2014; Washington, 2019), telling us that environmental justice and…

The aim of this article is to examine the immigration experiences of Latinx child characters in picturebooks, analyzing the portrayals for their potential impact as mirrors and windows for students in today's schools. This study builds on research that explores Latinx representation in children's literature by specifically attending to how authors…

The rise in hate crimes toward immigrants across communities (Potok, 2017) has led to a focus on children's literature with immigration themes for opening up conversations in classrooms (Rodriguez & Braden, 2018). Because children's knowledge about people and the communities they live in is informed by the media, portrayals of immigrants'…

Carl Hiaasen's "Flush" (2005) addresses one of the key issues of our time: environmental degradation. His story offers children opportunities to think about how to act and behave in the face of environmental challenges and serves as an argument against prioritizing capitalism over the environment and humanity. "Flush" positions…

"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,…

In this article, the authors provide a synopsis of the 2014 Children's Literature Assembly (CLA) Workshop. The Workshop explored how fiction and nonfiction children's and young adult's literature create opportunities for in-depth learning in the content areas. Participants had the opportunity to hear the stories of authors and illustrators of…

Ideological assumptions about childhood play into the production and selection of children's literature. Various ideologies proclaim that children should be happy and free from stories of evil, children's literature should help children encounter the joys in life, it should be filled with bright colors to keep children's attention, and it should…

In this article, the author relates how a lost dog gave her the idea for writing her book, "How to Steal a Dog." Her tale of serendipity began when she, a dog-lover, walked into a garden center near her home and saw a sign for a lost dog taped beside the cash register. She states that, although her story is about a girl who stole a dog and…

During the past three years, the author has been exploring Grade 5 students' processes of reading and understanding contemporary picturebooks with Radical Change characteristics and metafictive devices, and examining how students use their knowledge of these characteristics and devices to create their own texts. "The Stinky Cheese Man and Other…

The author of this article, who writes a series of Arthurian books, states that Arthurian retellings for children often fall into one of two extreme categories: (1) they are prim, romantic, reverential tales with soft-focus illustrations and soft-headed heroes; or (2) they are overt spoofs of the literature, a la Mark Twain and Monty Python. He…

Notes that the selections in this cluster of books, intended for students in the intermediate and middle school grades, portray youth as they courageously take strands for environmental protection or against societal injustice. Summarizes 10 titles including nonfiction, fiction, and picture books. (SG)