Where Are You From? Building Bridges over Walls with #OwnVoices Literature

Sharing literature representative of students' diverse experiences opens up conversations, invites inquiry, and develops empathy (Ward & Warren, 2020). It is well documented, however, that these books can be challenging to locate in schools, libraries, and bookstores (Bickmore, Xu, & Sheridan, 2017; Crisp et al., 2016; Jipson & Paley, 1991; D. Johnson & Koss, 2016). Data on books by and about people of color and from First/Native Nations published for children and teens compiled by the Cooperative Children's Book Center (CCBC) at the University of Wisconsin-- Madison demonstrate this dearth in the children's book market. Of the books received by the CCBC in 2018, 5% were written by African Americans, 1% by American Indians/First Nations, 9.6% by Asian Pacifics/Asian Pacific Americans, and 5.4% by Latinx (Cooperative Children's Book Center, 2019). Though these data do not indicate the percentage of those books representing the #OwnVoices perspective, in that they are not only by a person of marginalized identity but are also about the people of that identity, these statistics point to the significant need for more authors who represent diverse backgrounds creating children's books, as well as more of those authors who create books about their own experiences. This article will present a synthesis of the work of five authors who represent #OwnVoices (Duyvis, 2015) by writing about characters and places that align with their own marginalized identities. In their work, the authors problematize and navigate the challenging question "Where are you from?" through their #OwnVoices perspectives, giving teachers tools to use to facilitate such conversations in the classroom, and building a case for more #OwnVoices research and authorship.