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Created: 22nd November, 2022

Bookworms is an unusual book in that it started as a performance for an event. I was on the diversity panel for the Carnegie and Kate Greenaway awards in 2019, and was asked to write a piece to perform at an evening for publishers. So, the poem was actually not written for a target audience of children, but the publishers of their books! Being on the diversity panel and having already attended a few different talks and discussions on how we could finally start shifting the UK children’s book industry to deliver the necessary representations that it was desperately lacking, I knew I needed to write about diversity in children’s books. However, I am tired of ‘diversity checkbox-ing’, of performative displays of simply meeting the necessary criteria and saying all the buzzwords, so I knew it needed to be more than just ‘we need diversity in books’. The best representation is always from a place of lived experience. Did I have books with people like me growing up? No. Did I still love books? Absolutely. As such, I knew that the poem also had to be a love letter to being a reader when you were a child, because books were an immense source of joy throughout my childhood. But it wasn’t as simple as ‘I just really liked books’. I needed them, because I really struggled socially growing up. Whether it was my personality, my undiagnosed neurodivergency, or moving around a lot through my childhood, friends were difficult. There is a line in the poem about spending lunchtimes in libraries because the silence hides the lack of people to talk to. That was my experience. I remember choosing to go sit undercover somewhere in the playground with my book, or finding a corner of a library where I could sit and not be noticed, and yeah, it was really sad and difficult. But once I would start reading? Immediately that would fade away. I would be completely engaged and transported and all the clichés and stereotypes that everyone uses because they’re true. Books were a crucial part of me getting through childhood. That’s why while bookworms is a call for more diversity in books, it is still unflinchingly grateful to what the books I did have were able to do for me.

I think that because of the way Bookworms came to be- written for an adult audience and published for a child audience- it can be a little trickier to work out how it ‘fits’ in the world of books. There are words that the average child probably doesn’t know yet, and it is decidedly a poem that does not cling to couplets and strict rhyme structure. That can make it a little hard to work out how to make the most of it in a classroom. I am by no means a teacher, but as the poet behind it, I think there are a range of valuable ways to engage with it depending on who you’re working with and what the larger context is of where they’re at in their education. The first, for me, is that I believe there is raw value in this book purely at the level of Joelle Avelino’s beautiful illustrations. To have a book that depicts so many types of children is incredibly powerful, and the impact of that cannot be understated. In a similar vein, should you find a recording of me reading it (I believe there are a few floating around now), there is an extra value in hearing it. I am a spoken word poet, which means that not only are the meanings of the words that I use important, but the pacing matters, and the sounds of the words have been selected for a reason, so even if not every word is grasped, I believe that pairing Joelle’s visuals with the movement of my voice has a value of its own. Poetry is taught in such a restrictive way in school, and it alienates people. I’ve spoken to incredibly legitimate authors of prose who still have this idea that poetry is some mystical, unreachable thing. That means a lot of people miss out on this incredible outlet, which is more needed than ever as this generation has been through an incredible emotional upheaval, and they are going to need a way to contextualise and validate feelings that are too big or too confusing to put down in prose. Showing children more freeform poetry, especially at a young age, will give them the space to experiment, to reduce objective criteria to critique from, and to explore capturing feeling and catharsis. That, in my overly-passionate, poetry-loving opinion is an incredible gift.

There is also, of course, the main subject matter of the book. Bookworms can absolutely be used to springboard a discussion about representation in books. I am of the opinion that it handles the topic gently enough that it sidesteps the defensiveness that can arise in conversations like this. While I do think that there is need for discussions of accountability, which can rarely be considered without feelings of blame, those discussions do not take place in Bookworms. It approaches the idea from a place of already loving books, and asking that they become better. It shows a range of children, and in fact a range of minorities. I would encourage you to take note of the references to queerness, or disability that have been very intentionally placed in the book. Bookworms isn’t just about race, and I say that as someone who is a minority member in a range of aspects- I am queer, I am fat, I am a woman, I am a person of colour, I am neurodivergent, I am mentally ill. There are many types of people who don’t get to see themselves in books, and I hope that anyone who uses Bookworms in their classroom underlines that fact. We don’t just need more black people in books, we need more black girls, more African immigrants, more queer people, more disabled people, more disabled people of colour, and on and on. In addition, I hope that should you teach this message, you do not stop at ‘we need more diversity because minority members deserve to see themselves’. While true, when we only go this far we actually take a ‘white saviour’ (or whatever majority group might be relevant) stance. We need more stories about more types of people because minority members have incredible stories to tell. Because if you’ve only read stories about white, cishet, able-bodied people you are missing out on fresh, exciting, different stories. In the poem itself I purposely reference that each of these hypothetical children reading their books have communities of people like them out in the world who are living stories. Those are stories everyone should want to read- variety is the spice of life and whatnot.

I will now force myself to bring this long, impassioned ramble to a close- you can see why I’m a poet not an author! I hope that this blogpost has helped to show that I am genuinely excited about this book and what it can do. I hope it’s provided more context for the poem, and a better understanding of who wrote it. If nothing else, I hope it has given you ideas on how to approach diversity and inclusion in your classroom in general. I hope you love Bookworms, I hope your children love it, and thank you so much for taking the time to read an overly emotional young woman’s thoughts.

Discover Nyanda Foday's new book, Bookworms, published by Andersen Press...