Some 330 booksellers from 44 states attended the ABA's seventh annual Children's Institute, in Pittsburgh, Pa., last week. It was another energetic and dynamic meeting that featured the first ABA town hall at a children's institute, as well as two full days of keynotes, panels, meet-and-greets--and conversations about everything from nuts-and-bolts bookselling matters to diversity and how to help smaller and non-traditional bookstores.
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| ABC Advisory Council members (l.-r.) Summer Dawn Laurie, Books Inc., San Francisco, Calif.; Javier Ramirez, The Book Table, Oak Park, Ill.; Kenny Brechner, Devaney, Doak and Garrett Booksellers, Farmington, Maine; Sara Grochowski, McLean and Eakin Booksellers, Petoskey, Mich.; and Emily Hall, Main Street Books, St. Charles, Minn. | |
On Thursday morning, members of the ABC Advisory council moderated a high-energy and passionate conversation in a session titled Talking Productively About Content Issues. The attendees worked together to create a list of subjects to discuss, and the group as a whole responded with suggestions and personal stories of success. The topics included "how to book talk titles to schools that find the content objectionable," "stocking problematic books," "having better in-store conversations," "starting on the front end with books that have been pulled from publication" and "positive representation of people with disabilities."
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| (l.-r.) Jonathan Hamilt (aka Ms. Ona Louise), Drag Queen Story Hour; Anastasia McKenna, The Twig Bookshop, San Antonio, Tex.; Tegan Tigani, Queen Anne Book Co., Seattle, Wash.; and Angela Whited, Red Balloon Bookshop, St. Paul, Minn. | |
In The Art of Reading Aloud, three children's booksellers and a representative from Drag Queen Story Hour held a mock story time to display their own methods for reading aloud. Each presenter had specific suggestions to go along with their story time, taking a few moments after the reading of the book to point out the different tools they had used throughout. Angela Whited of Red Balloon Bookshop in St. Paul, Minn., suggested booksellers choose titles with sparse text and rhyming words; Anastasia McKenna of The Twig Bookshop in San Antonio, Tex., acted out her personal brand of reading aloud by displaying "poetic license" with the text; Ms. Ona Louise (Jonathan Hamilt) from Drag Queen Story Hour started with a song to get the crowd up, moving and engaged; and Tegan Tigani of Queen Anne Book Co. in Seattle, Wash., pointed out how a book's illustrations and the size of the text often give the reader hints as to how to perform the book.
Caitlyn Morrissey of Bank Street Books in New York City moderated a group discussion about creating space for LGBTQ+ youth. Topics included whether booksellers find specifically defined LGBTQ+ spaces to be helpful or harmful for their readers; how to approach discussions about content a customer finds problematic; how to handsell (and when not to handsell) works featuring trans characters; the ways in which staff use non-gendered plural nouns; and whether children's book recommendations are kept separate from adult book recommendations.
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| Elizabeth Acevedo | |
Elizabeth Acevedo's immense talent as a slam poet is on beautiful display any time she is called upon to give a speech. As Ci7's afternoon keynote speaker on the last day of the conference, Acevedo drew a crowd of large, attendees were standing along the walls and sitting on the floor. As she has so successfully done before, Acevedo built her speech around "a couple of stories" which she then wound together until seemingly unrelated experiences coincided in grand and meaningful ways. As always, she herself is asking of the greater community the same question one of her students asked her: "Where are the books about us?" And, as always, she's doing her part to create them. "People like us," she said, were always told, "You are not canon." These "Nobles of Canon" "leave people like me in the gutters and say that we are not well read." Well, she asked, "What does it mean to reinvent canons?" She's clearly working to figure that out.
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| Alyssa Milano (l.) and Kris Kleindienst | |
"There was a time when activism meant progressing things forward," said activist, author and actor Alyssa Milano during the closing keynote at Children's Institute 7 on Friday. Milano was in conversation with Kris Kleindienst, owner of Left Bank Books in St. Louis, Mo., to talk about her decades-long career as an activist and her new middle-grade book, Hope: Project Middle School, written with Debbie Rigaud and illustrated by Eric S. Keyes.
"Right now activism means we're trying not to have our rights that were already set forth rolled back," Milano continued. "You're not fighting for progress: you're just trying to dig your heels in and make sure that they don't take away what we've already fought for."
On the subject of her book, Milano said she wrote it to "encourage what's already innately in our kids," by which she means their goodness, resilience and hope. She said: "It's not about indoctrinating them into a certain political ideology--there's nothing political in any of these books--it's about encouraging what a child already has in them.... I think every child wants to help. They want to make a difference." --Siân Gaetano and Alex Mutter