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Nicola Yoon is a hopeless romantic.  She says so on her website.  As a matter of fact, Nicola shares many things in her bio that are…well…I’m just going to give you the address and encourage you to read one of the best bios ever!   http://www.nicolayoon.com/bio/

She grew up in Jamaica (the island) and Brooklyn (part of Long Island), and currently resides in Los Angeles, CA with her husband and daughter, both of whom she loves beyond all reason.

Nicola is a proud member of We Need Diverse Books, and we are just as proud to honor her during our 28 Days Later Program.

So, on this, the 28th Day of February, The Brown Bookshelf presents:     NICOLA YOON

The Journey

I had a kind of a long and roundabout journey to publishing. I was a math nerd in high school and majored in Electrical Engineering in college. It wasn’t until my senior year when I…

Alright, so that’s not actually the name of the conference, but that’s how I felt about it.

It was amazing to be surrounded by Octavia E. Butler scholars and her society (Yes, OEB has her own society).

Photo credit: Matthew Mullens 

My brain couldn’t even handle all the ways of looking at Butler’s work. It exploded and mended itself together and then exploded again. Boom.
The added bonus was that during the luncheon, people who had the opportunity of meeting Butler, shared those stories. I was happy and jealous at the same time.

I was also able to participate in creating a Wikipedia page for Mind of My Mind that didn’t exist before the conference. My little nerd heart almost couldn’t take it. I have a feeling I’m going to go back and add more to it later.  I got a chance to do a quick self-guided tour…

By David Bowles

When my three kids were younger, we had a tradition of reading YA fantasy and sci-fi series together. Harry Potter was a big deal for many years, followed by His Dark Materials, Percy Jackson, Hunger Games, and so on. I even read the Twilight series with my oldest daughter, if you can believe it.

This shared reading was fantastic. We shed tears, laughed aloud, and had many deep conversations. One thing we kept coming back to—as Mexican-American fans of speculative fiction—was the lack of people of color in most of the books we read (beyond secondary, less important roles). Typically these series boasted a team of what amounted to Anglo young people facing off against European or Western legendary beings, gods, or dilemmas.

“Wouldn’t it be nice,” we often mused, “to open one of these books and find a Chicana facing off against Aztec deities or…

This year, we get a little extra. On Day 29, we are delighted to have the opportunity to welcome Edi Campbell, an academic librarian who blogs at Crazy Quilts. Edi “works to improve the literacy of teens of color and am a strong ally for all marginalized young people. As part of this effort, I also work to promote authors of color. Reading multiple varieties of text is the basis for all literacies and in becoming literate, we learn how to navigate the world around us.” Thank you, Edi, and again, welcome:

It is an honor to be part of the 28 Days celebration. As I’ve read about works of such outstanding authors and artists over the years, I never even imagined that I’d be part of it; still cannot believe it. I started blogging about marginalized teens almost ten years ago and when I began, I was pretty…

While I was in Atlanta for the Octavia Butler Conference, I got a chance to visit the Center for Civil and Human Rights. I’m going to share the pictures I took, but you need to go for yourself to get the full experience.

This experience made me teary, the whole museum really, but this right here…