Some Recent C-SPAN Offerings of Interest to Librarians and Book Lovers: The Harlem Book Fair, and To Kill a Mockingbird

I spent a good chunk of yesterday reading a book (Fresh: A Perishable History) while listening to/watching C-SPAN BookTV‘s coverage of the 2010 Harlem Book Fair (this is a special kind of book-obsessed geekery).

For whatever reason, C-SPAN has these videos set as “not shareable” and “not embeddable,” so you’ll have to go to the actual sites to see them; I have managed to provide a direct link to the video clip of interest.

First, there is a panel discussion on diversity in children’s and young adult publishing. This panel features authors Nick Burd, Jerry Craft, and Zetta Elliott, along with Wade Hudson and Cheryl Willis Hudson of Just Us Books, and Vanesse J Lloyd-Sgambati of the African American Children’s Book Project. Librarians may be interested in discussion of the need to collect children’s and young adult books that reflect a variety of ethnicities and skin tones. The panelists also spoke about the need for parents to have books in the home, and the problem of the assumption that children’s books featuring white characters are for all children while books featuring non-white characters are assumed to be only for the populations they depict.

A second panel of interest was the biography and memoir panel, which might provide some to-read or “to buy for the library” suggestions. It featured the following authors talking about their lives and books:

• Wes Moore, The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates
• Max Siegel, Know What Makes Them Tick: How to Successfully Negotiate Almost Any Situation
• Karen Chilton, Hazel Scott: The Pioneering Journey of a Jazz Pianist, from Cafe Society to Hollywood to HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee)
• Thomas Chatterton Williams, Losing My Cool: How a Father’s Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-hop Culture
• Leonard T. Miller, Racing While Black: How an African-American Stock Car Team Made Its Mark on NASCAR

Finally, BookTV also aired an event from the recent American Libraries Assocation meeting featuring author Mary McDonagh Murphy talking about the impact of Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” and her book, “Scout, Atticus & Boo: A Celebration of Fifty Years of To Kill a Mockingbird.” The discussion also features celebrity librarian Nancy Pearl.

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