I thought it might be handy to have a general thread to document weirdos, gatekeepers, and short term dogpiles from the YA "community".
I'll get the ball rolling with Ebony Elizabeth Thomas. Most of her Twitter is sperging on about race related things, particularly in fiction. She is an Associate Professor, in a VERY interesting subject area...
She's got a book coming out which is all about this:
Slightly related, we might have something of a "Shadowy Don" in the YA community. Her literary agent is Brooks Sherman - he also represents Angie Thomas, who wrote The Hate U Give, aka the BLM movie; and Becky Albertalli, who wrote Simon VS the Homo Sapiens Agenda, which was about a gay teen and was also adapted into a movie.
I'll get the ball rolling with Ebony Elizabeth Thomas. Most of her Twitter is sperging on about race related things, particularly in fiction. She is an Associate Professor, in a VERY interesting subject area...
Ebony Elizabeth Thomas studies how people of color are portrayed, or not portrayed, in children’s and young adult literature, and how those portrayals shape our culture. She regularly reviews children’s books featuring diverse heroes and heroines, teens and tweens caught between cultures, and kids from the margins for the Los Angeles Times. She has a particular interest in young adult fantasy literature and fan culture. A former English and language arts teacher, Thomas also explores how teachers handle traumatic historical events, such as slavery, when teaching literature.
https://www.gse.upenn.edu/news/faculty/thomas
She's got a book coming out which is all about this:
This book sounds several years out of date, and based on some statements (will re-find later) she has been writing it and getting rejected for years. I guess it's ironic that her drivel only got taken seriously when the industry changed beyond the point of what she was actually talking about...The Dark Fantastic
reveals the diversity crisis in children's and young adult media as not only a lack of representation, but a lack of imagination
Stories provide portals into other worlds, both real and imagined. The promise of escape draws people from all backgrounds to speculative fiction, but when people of color seek passageways into the fantastic, the doors are often barred. This problem lies not only with children’s publishing, but also with the television and film executives tasked with adapting these stories into a visual world. When characters of color do appear, they are often marginalized or subjected to violence, reinforcing for audiences that not all lives matter.
The Dark Fantastic is an engaging and provocative exploration of race in popular youth and young adult speculative fiction. Grounded in her experiences as YA novelist, fanfiction writer, and scholar of education, Thomas considers four black girl protagonists from some of the most popular stories of the early 21st century: Bonnie Bennett from the CW’s The Vampire Diaries, Rue from Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, Gwen from the BBC’s Merlin, and Angelina Johnson from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter. Analyzing their narratives and audience reactions to them reveals how these characters mirror the violence against black and brown people in our own world.
In response, Thomas uncovers and builds upon a tradition of fantasy and radical imagination in Black feminism and Afrofuturism to reveal new possibilities. Through fanfiction and other modes of counter-storytelling, young people of color have reinvisioned fantastic worlds that reflect their own experiences, their own lives. As Thomas powerfully asserts, “we dark girls deserve more, because we are more.”
https://nyupress.org/9781479800650/the-dark-fantastic/
Slightly related, we might have something of a "Shadowy Don" in the YA community. Her literary agent is Brooks Sherman - he also represents Angie Thomas, who wrote The Hate U Give, aka the BLM movie; and Becky Albertalli, who wrote Simon VS the Homo Sapiens Agenda, which was about a gay teen and was also adapted into a movie.