Our eighth We Are Kidlit Summer Reading list will be released early Monday morning. As always, it’s been a labor of love. Through tremendous personal loss, Covid, relocations, dissertations and whatever else life through at is, we always came back to this list. I can’t tell you how proud I am of the dedication we all have to this work.

Dr. Sonia Rodriquez and Tad Andracki left us at the end of the year last year and knowing Sam Bloom and his work, we asked him to join us. And, we’re so glad we did! He’s been a real asset to the team.

This isn’t a list to bring you the best of the best, it’s simply a way of bringing attention to the good books that are out there by BIPOC creators, of celebrating literacy and I think in some ways to deconstruct the canon. As we work to identify books that are free of oppressions, microaggressions and hatred, we celebrate works that express liberation. Sometimes we miss, sometimes books slip through, but we really work hard to collect creations we think all young readers can enjoy.

To get you ready for what’s coming Monday Morning, I asked everyone currently on the team what they enjoy most about our little list and here’s what we had to say. Yes, indeed there’s much to look forward to on Monday morning!

Lyn Miller-Lachmann
1. its size and the variety of choices in all categories but especially the early readers and chapter books
2. the highlighting of older titles that perhaps have fallen off people’s radar and deserve renewed attention
3. the way we’ve honored book creators whom we’ve lost in the past several years

Sujei Lugo

1. Learning and sharing about older and newer titles.
2. Challenging ourselves to look at titles with intersecting identities and how to always evaluate how all marginalized identities are represented or misrepresented.
3. Sharing these titles with children and caregivers at my library and community.

Sam Bloom

1. it’s a wonderful mix of old and new.
2. the tributes to all the giants we’ve lost in the last year and a half.
3. it is SO extensive (that’s a nice way of saying it’s LOOOOOOONGG 😂).

Edith Campbell
1.The dedication and respect we bring to this work.
2. the multiple ways we work to diversify our list.
3. that our discussions are based solely in critical literacy, not western concepts of literary merit.

Have you seen or used the list? What do you enjoy about it?