One of the most awarded and prolific authors of books featuring black characters and culture talks about issues and approaches for children’s writers of color
This month’s Bologna Children’s Book Fair included a “Black Books Matter” panel with an exhibition of illustration work for books that have won the Coretta Scott King Award. The panel provided insights into the experience of writing children’s and YA books from the African-American perspective. As writers of color find it especially difficult to get a start in the publishing business, we were keen to learn from an accomplished author in the sector. So we turned to panelist Nikki Grimes—an author with decades of experience and more than 55 titles in the field—to ask some practical questions.
Grimes has been publishing since 1993 and won her first Coretta Scott King Award in 1998 for Jazmin’s Notebook. Now in her 60s, she’s frequently a King Award honoree and publishes with a range of houses, including Boyds Mills Press, Penguin, HarperCollins, and Bloomsbury. Her memoir, Ordinary Hazards, will be out in October from Wordsong. She says she basically “has one editor I’ve followed from house to house for 20 years. She’s not ever allowed to retire.” Grimes shared the following insights with us.
Foreign rights: Grimes confirms that international rights agents (especially in European markets dealing with immigration issues) aren’t yet always seeing African-American children’s books as “the important piece” for the international rights market that they can be. It takes more homework than agents may realize, Grimes says, to present these works at a trade show. Rights directors or agents need to assess what a given foreign market is working with in terms of its own minority populations so they can make the comparison for a potential overseas publisher. “We’ve already covered a lot of the territory” of interracial experience that refugee populations bring to many countries, Grimes says. But it takes specific preparation to say that a good black book from the States might have application to a current situation in Stockholm or Berlin or Warsaw.
Self-publishing: Grimes doesn’t recommend that children’s writers who feature racially diverse characters resort to self-publishing unless it’s the only recourse. Patience in finding representation, she says, is important and worth it. “The main problem is editing,” she says. Particularly in children’s work, “truly professional editing is simply mandatory.” And the other problem, she says, is marketing. Without a publisher, it’s difficult to get into the library-school-bookstore channels that buoy so much of the children’s sector. Furthermore, the huge raft of children’s literature awards—including the Coretta Scott King Book Awards, the John Newbery Medal, the Randolph Caldecott Medal, the (Theodor Seuss) Geisel Award, and many others—that lead the industry each year are administered by the American Library Association.
Voice: Grimes says the African-American children’s book, in the broadest sense, has largely moved past the stage in which it was focused on historical explanation and the backdrop of leadership figures from the past. While many books for girls today are compendiums of great women such as Harriet Tubman, black books now are generally working a much more contemporary line of storytelling. This has tied in well with Grimes’s own interests, which were relatively urban from the start. She advises writers to look for what they do most naturally and capitalize on it. For Grimes, this is poetry; she is known for verse novels. “For most of my career, I’ve constantly, constantly been told, ‘Oh, don’t do poetry. Poetry doesn’t sell. And I had to say, ‘Can I just go ahead and write it?’” Grimes says that the novelty of her poetic style—Garvey’s Choice is written in 100 small poems, for example—has factored into her success, although a distinctive stylistic element like this takes determination. “I was in Los Angeles recently, and one librarian after another was asking, ‘Do you have any novels in verse?’” She’d spent the better part of three decades writing what they were looking for.
Bottom line: There’s a double challenge to being a minority author who writes for or about a minority perspective: the author’s relations with publishers and finding opportunities for publication can be as challenging as creating the content of the work itself. Grimes heard complaints from minority authors in the audience at Bologna that they were having trouble getting published in their home countries. She suggests such authors establish their own small publishing houses and use those houses to form mentoring partnerships with African-American publishers in America. Banding together to create a house and then reaching out to a major market that has established itself and is now looking out to the rest of the world might be the fastest route for black and other diversity-driven content in the next few years, she says.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
