Happy St. Patrick’s Day Links

• Malindo Lo talks about race, fantasy worlds, and why the author’s intent doesn’t really matter in the end unless it’s reflected in the book’s content.

• Everyone’s seen the LA Times article by now, right?  Grownups read YA?  Shocking!

• Zetta Elliott has a wonderful essay in the March/April edition of Horn Book, sort of a personal history of race and children’s literature and how the intersection between the two can affect imagination and creativity in a child. Lucky for us you can read it online: Decolonizing the Imagination.

• Hyphen, a magazine that explores Asian-American culture, has an article exploring the changes in teen and kidlit books with Asian protagonists.  They find that many of the books are no longer primarily about the experience of being Asian-American, but can tell all kinds of stories with characters that happen to be Asian.  Hooray!

• Sociological Images explores the covers of books featuring overweight women.  What they find isn’t going to surprise anyone, but it’s always good to draw more attention.

• Need another reason to get upset about library branch closures?  This graphic showing the demographics of home broadband access will give you one.

• Liz B talks a little bit about the recent cover controversy, and what she feels is her personal responsibility.  It’s nice to see people putting thought into what they can do.

• Penguin shows off some of the things they’re hoping to do on ebooks for the ipad.  I think we’re going to be seeing some really cool stuff being developed – I’m excited!

• The latest awesome thing at 100 Scope Notes – Spine Poetry!  Check out the collection of submissions, too.

• This article cracks me up – somebody measured student work during March Madness by looking at the number of articles accessed through library databases.

• And finally, a super-interesting video that shows the full process of designing and creating a book cover through screenshots of the process.  I watched this about 10 times – the video itself is already mesmerizing, but the music puts it over the top.  Go watch!

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