Publications
Stories Matter the Most! The Long History of Diversity in Children’s and Young Adult Literature
Ten years after the passage of NCTE’s Resolution on the Need for Diverse Children’s and Young Adult Books, this chapter revisits the landscape of diversity in literature for young people. Drawing on updated data from the Cooperative Children’s Book Center and a decade of organizational, publishing, and pedagogical change, we trace what has shifted since 2016 and what remains stubbornly unchanged. The chapter begins with the deep historical roots of advocacy for diverse representation in children’s books, examines the institutional and grassroots movements that reshaped children’s publishing between 2016 and 2026, and confronts the organized political backlash against diverse literature that has emerged as one of the defining educational conflicts of the current era.
Picturing Change Critical Literacy, Picturebooks, and a Pedagogy of Hope in Climate Change Education
Drawing on a teacher action research project designed for a fourth grade classroom as well as close readings of climate-themed picturebooks from the United States, the Caribbean, and Argentina, this chapter explores opportunities for incorporating global eco-literature into the upper elementary classroom. In particular, I focus on how using a pedagogy of hope facilitates young people’s and educators’ engagement with this topic on a globally interconnected scale while also addressing the climate anxiety that limits engagement with the climate crisis. Using two picturebooks from each country and the accompanying lessons as guides, I offer both a critique of the state of climate-themed picturebooks from a global perspective and strategies for educators interested in incorporating similar texts as part of their climate-justice educational practice.
(Trans)mediating Nimona: Homonormativity and the Monstrous Queer Child
This article investigates Nimona to understand the way queer content is repackaged and sanitized when presented to younger audiences. In particular, it deploys Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s “Monster Theory (Seven Theses)” (1996, 3) alongside Jules Gill-Peterson’s concept of “plasticity” (2018, 35) to clarify the homonormativizing effect of removing discussion of the embodied harm of medical trauma from Nimona’s experience of her own shifting, monstrous, queer identity.
Beyond Visibility: Rethinking the Closet in El Niño Perfecto and Julián is a Mermaid
Reading against the trend of queer-themed picture books to center tragic coming-out moments, this article explores the alternative approaches to queer visibility presented in two picture books about boys in dresses: Jessica Love’s Julián is a Mermaid and Àlex González and Bernat Cormand’s El Niño Perfecto. In particular, the author draws on Muñoz’s concepts of straight time and disidentification to argue that while Julián’s utopian joy at being publicly accepted is one strategy for revising the pessimism of queer picture books generally, it is not the only one. By refusing to come out at all, the protagonist of El Niño Perfecto rejects visibility as necessary for queer joy, instead modeling a disidentificatory form of queer emancipation in which the unexpected space of the closet becomes not a source of queer trauma but a reclaimed space for queer freedom.
But the Boys Are Still Bullies A Typology of Supporting Characters in Queer-Themed Picture Books
Although queer picture books are growing in popularity, research on these texts still tends toward an overgeneralization of the field. This article takes a narrow focus on secondary characters in texts that center boys wearing dresses to see what reactions to boyhood gender nonconformity are supported in this sub- category of texts. Through close readings of various scenes throughout eight pic- ture books, the article highlights gendered and aged patterns in these responses: women are supportive but distant, girls are close allies, men are absent or hesitant to support the boys, and other boys are generally bullies. The article concludes that while these texts are ostensibly queer because of their protagonists’ gender performances, they nevertheless fail to disrupt gender norms beyond the lives of their central characters.