Here we are, less than one week from the ALA Youth Media Awards. They’ll be announced Monday 22 January during the LibLearnX conference that will meet in Baltimore. At 8:00amET, I’ll be joining the live stream to celebrate some of the most outstanding books of the year.

Having served on a few award committees, I can appreciate what it takes to select the winners. But, for a while now, I’m considering how this type of work perpetuates the presence of white supremacy by promoting exclusion rather than plurality (Brooks). Sure, many prestigious literary awards have become more inclusive of marginalize writers but, what about the process itself? It’s that act of pitting one book, one author against another to decide the best of the best rather than creating a community of stories that distorts the canon.

I’m coming to prefer the concept of vernacular stewardship that Daphne Brooks derived from Kara Keeling as a form of care where marginalized communities look after and tend to cultural objects, such as books and their stories. This approach recognizes and maintains a variety of artistic expressions.

“And being able to tell the story of how those forms came into being is always interesting. It’s always illuminating. It’s often edifying. So we can also ask a different set of questions. So not just which art matters, but why did certain groups of people need these expressive forms in a particular given place and time?

This concept really hit home when I considered all the books that are important to the minoritized communities that rarely received an award, were too often excluded from the curriculum, and rarely analyzed in scholarly writings. These stories, as described by Brooks, express and align with a movement or community, innovate form or disrupt language practices.

This first book to come to my mind? The Hate You Give. The book was selected for several outstanding lists for the year it was published, was a finalist for the Kirkus award, longlisted for the National Book Award, an honor book for the CSK Award, the Carnegie Medal and the Printz Award. (I was on the committee that year). It was winner of the Amelia Elizabeth Walden Award, the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award. It’s been a favorite for book clubs and classrooms as well as for challenges and bans. Awards have criteria quite different than those that set a book apart for its cultural significance yet, THUG hit all of the parameters for being a cultural object that expands the canon.

Angie Thomas, the book’s author, honed her craft in the hip hop tradition. Her writing grew from this cultural tradition and aligned with two significant cultural movements: Black Lives Matter and We Need Diverse Books. Thomas was able to use her poetry skills to wordsmith a story with vocabulary and syntax that innovated youth literature. This is a very brief analysis of what could take a thesis to fully develop, but here, I’m just thinking through ideas that have been sitting with me for a while.

I think about how the language we’re expected to use – the words, structures, spellings – relates to power. The arrangement of words can control change what is meant to what is said. Limiting vocabulary and grammar choices can erase identities. 

I asked friends on FB what books by marginalized authors, they think have made significant contributions to YA lit, either because they were published at a time when their message was particularly significant, because their literary significance disrupted literary stylings, or extraordinary sales which would indicate huge public appeal. In some way, the book could create a new path for what followed it. The examples I gave were Monster by Walter Dean Myers, American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang, and Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred Taylor. Here are their suggestions.

Show Me A Sign by Ann Clare LeZotte
Future Girl/Words in My Hands by Asphyxia
Corinne Duyvis’s works
Shadow Sky trilogy by Joseph Elliott
Simon vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertali
They Both Die in the End by Adam Silvera
If I Ever Get Out of Here by Eric Gansworth

I would look at Shine by kpop star Jessica Jung to see the influence of kpop on storytelling techniques and language. And, for the same reasons I’d consider The First Rule of Punk by Celia C. Pérez, Jazz Owls by Margarita Engle, and works by Laeken Zea Kemp, all suggested from Cristina Rhodes. I think musicians and songwriters disrupt language standards, in ways that often relate to youth in meaningful ways.

The awards won’t go away, I don’t know that they have to. They’re fun, and they feed both the capitalists, and the supremacists buy building a hierarchy of goods with increased sales. I’ll watch the ceremony, and celebrate the winners, but I’ll continue to find ways to care for all kinds of expression. Can there be too many ways to recognize good literature?