Looking for Excellent “Diverse” Books for Children? Start Here!

In 8 tips for choosing ‘good’ picture books featuring Black and Indigenous people and People of Color (BIPOC), our colleagues at Diverse BookFinder offer recommendations about how to evaluate “diverse” and “multicultural” children’s books to find great books the children in your life will love.

In this piece, we identify promising starting points, in addition to the Diverse BookFinder, for your search for children’s books to which you might apply the criteria described in 8 tips. The blogs and sites named below by no means exhaust the list of sites that highlight excellent children’s books. Nor do all the books featured on those sites meet each of the 8 tips criteria. However, a search that begins with the sites on this list is likely to bear quality fruit!

EmbraceRace is not affiliated with any of these sites.

Major hubs for discovering diverse children's books

• Diverse BookFinder
• Social Justice Books
• We Need Diverse Books (Also check out their OurStory app)

Children’s book sites and blogs we like

• American Indians in Children’s Literature Blog
• Anansesem - The Caribbean Children's Literature Ezine
• The Brown Bookshelf
• Edi Cotton Quilt
• De Colores: The Raza Experience in Books for Children
• Diverse Futures
• Hijabi Librarians
• I'm Your Neighbor Books (featuring New Arrivals and New Americans)
• Indigo’s Bookshelf: Voices of Native Youth
• Kids Like Us
• Kitaab World
• Latinxs in Kid Lit
• Lee & Low Blog
• Oyate | Reviews
• Reading While White
• Rich in Color
• Vamos a Leer
• We Are Kid Lit Collective

Creating an anti-bias children's book collection

Looking to create an anti-bias library or evaluate/review books yourself? These articles and frameworks about evaluating representation in children’s literature can help you think about bias in children’s books and other media.

• A Guide for Selecting Anti-Bias Children’s Books: Excellent step-by-step advice from an anti-bias hero.
• Two Rules for My Daughter’s Library: Mia Birdsong discusses her experience only giving her daughter books without white characters or authors.
• Oyate’s Resources on Native people’s children’s literature — which books to Avoid and How to Tell the Difference: Super resource for American Indian, First Nations literature and resources, including these evaluation tips.
  
• Unmaking the White Default: Kirkus Reviews on writing race conscious book reviews.
• Beware the Bigoted Subtext of Children’s Literature: A discussion of the horrible outcomes from the lack of diverse books for people of all ages.
  
• EmbraceRace Co-Founder Andrew Grant-Thomas on NPR about reading racist books with kids: Some great tips on how to decide what your kids are ready for.
• Lee & Low Books' Classroom Library Questionnaire: Use this to conduct a diversity audit of your classroom or home library, with kids.

Where to get ebooks for kids online

• Finding Diverse Electronic Picture Books #1, Diverse Book Finder, 3/27/20
• Finding Diverse Electronic Picture Books #2, Diverse Book Finder, 4/22/20
• How to get free e-books from your public library, CNET, 3/18/20