Grow­ing up, it trou­bled me that the books to be found about black peo­ple con­cerned either slav­ery or the Civ­il Rights Move­ment, and pre­cious­ly lit­tle else. As for books about con­tem­po­rary life, for­get it. It was as if African Amer­i­cans sim­ply did not exist with­in that frame­work.  So, as an author, I deter­mined ear­ly on to focus on African Amer­i­can chil­dren nav­i­gat­ing the ups and downs of con­tem­po­rary life. I want­ed to cre­ate sto­ries with which today’s young black read­ers could relate.  In doing so, I sought, and con­tin­ue to seek, to give voice to the voiceless.

That said, my books are not only relat­able to black read­ers. The sto­ries I tell are human sto­ries, sto­ries of loss, for­give­ness and grace, sto­ries that are some­times humor­ous, some­times trag­ic. My char­ac­ters laugh and cry, bleed red when cut, wres­tle with rage, remorse, con­fu­sion, and all the oth­er emo­tions human beings expe­ri­ence. In oth­er words, despite the speci­fici­ty of race, my sto­ries, whether in poet­ry or prose, are for everyone.

Recent­ly, I vis­it­ed two of the largest inde­pen­dent book­sellers in a major met­ro­pol­i­tan area.  In the first, the store’s own­er and two of her employ­ees expressed how hon­ored they were to meet me.  They each rat­tled off some of their favorites of titles authored by me, spoke glow­ing­ly about shar­ing my books with their young charges, in schools and libraries where they’d worked in the past, and even posed for pho­tographs with me.  Clear­ly, they had enor­mous respect for the work I do. And yet,they had only one copy of one of my books on their shelves—and the most com­mer­cial one, at that. As for the sec­ond store, they had not a sin­gle title—this in a sea­son in which I had two new books, and one reis­sue ship­ping to stores across the country.

Huh? I don’t get it.

I left both stores shak­ing my head, but it didn’t take me long to con­nect the dots. Each store was locat­ed in a pre­dom­i­nant­ly white neighborhood.

Now, before you say “Oh!  That makes sense,” keep in mind that my read­er­ship cross­es all bound­aries of race and cul­ture.  I get let­ters from black and His­pan­ic read­ers, as you would no doubt assume. There are also fans as far away as Chi­na and Japan.  But I also get at least half my let­ters from white read­ers on farms in the Mid­west, min­ing com­mu­ni­ties in Appalachia, schools in the south, and points through­out the Pacif­ic North­west, among oth­ers. In oth­er words, white chil­dren are read­ing and lov­ing my books. So, the chil­dren are not the problem.

Once again, the prob­lem is with the gatekeepers—in this case, the book­sellers. It is they who assume that their cus­tomers will not be inter­est­ed in the books I write. Why? Because the char­ac­ters on the cov­er are African Amer­i­can. But those book­sellers are wrong. I fre­quent­ly hear from white par­ents who are frus­trat­ed in their attempts to build racial­ly diverse book col­lec­tions for their chil­dren, want­i­ng to expose their young ones to all of the cul­tures that make up this great coun­try. They go to their local book­stores on the hunt and are dis­mayed by the lack of mul­ti­cul­tur­al and, specif­i­cal­ly, black titles avail­able on the shelves.

Some well-mean­ing white friends some­times try to shush me when I bring up race, espe­cial­ly as it per­tains to the children’s book field, but the hard truth is that race remains a sticky wick­et in this coun­try, a black man in the Oval Office notwithstanding.

I’ve spent many long years try­ing to write my way out of the ghet­to. I’ve pub­lished prodi­gious­ly, pro­mot­ed my work through book­store events, reg­u­lar­ly spo­ken at con­fer­ences and book fes­ti­vals, criss­crossed the coun­try vis­it­ing schools, giv­en count­less inter­views, writ­ten fea­tures and edi­to­ri­als for numer­ous trade jour­nals and more. I’ve even gar­nered a fair share of pres­ti­gious book awards. But for all that, I find that my work is still being mar­gin­al­ized. I’ve lost count of the num­ber of book­store shelves absent of my books, even in those years when I’ve pub­lished as many as five titles.  Sigh.

Here’s what I’ve come to: I can’t con­trol book­sellers, or oth­er gate­keep­ers, or their rea­sons for choos­ing not to stock, at the very least, my most cur­rent titles. The only thing I can con­trol is my work.  So I will con­tin­ue to write books that mat­ter, for chil­dren and young adults who mat­ter, whether they oper­ate in the mar­gins or not. I still hold out hope that my work will some­how con­tin­ue to reach the broad­est pos­si­ble audience.

I hope book-lovers in every com­mu­ni­ty begin to demand a more racial­ly diverse selec­tion of titles from which to choose. In the end, that’s not on me. I get that now.