Centering Disability In Youth Books

Quite coincidentally, two excellent blog posts came out within a day of each other that address the issue of disability and #ownvoices representation in children's books.

The first published on Tuesday April 27 is entitled How Can I Tell If This is a Harmful Representation of Disability  on S. Bryce Kozla's blog. Bryce has been a thoughtful leader and thinker on the topic of disability justice in libraries. Her post is a great starting point for us to think about the books we have in our collections as well as how to evaluate them to determine whether the books and other media contain harmful representations.

The second post published on Wednesday, April 28 ran on the Book Riot blog. In her article The Current State of Disability Representation in Children's Books, Margaret Kingsbury takes an in-depth look at the state of disability representation through an exploration of publisher and #ownvoices book creators responses. Using CCBC statistics and centering the voices of book creators, her article amplifies Bryce's points and enriches our understanding of disability representation.