Mar 6

Mar 6 Podcast #20: Diversifying the Shelves (Part 2) with Author Sarah Ockler & Blogger Racquel of The Book Barbies

We're super-thrilled to publish the second half of our discussion with author Sarah Ockler and Racquel, blogger from The Book Barbies, about diversifying our bookshelves, how writers can work to authentically represent people of color in their fiction and recommendations for books and authors that do this successfully. You can find the first half over here.

In this half, we get down to the nitty-gritty and recommend some novels that really, in our eyes, get it right, and why. It's important to emphasize that this is most definitely not a comprehensive conversation--if anything, it's framing questions and talking about our personal experiences. We hope to continue to explore this topic in future episodes. If you'd like to be involved in a future podcast discussion on this subject, get in touch and let's talk.

We invited Sarah Ockler on because she wrote this great post on her blog on this very subject some time ago, and then walked the walk in her next book, The Book of Broken Hearts (2013, Simon Pulse), which we discussed extensively in one of the first podcast episodes of season one. Her next book, #scandal, is due out this summer and Laura and I have both already read and very much enjoyed it. Learn more about Sarah on her website and be sure to follow her on Twitter, too.

Racquel, along with her co-blogger Sharon, runs one of our favorite blogs, The Book Barbies. She's still an actual teen, and is in her first year in college. Racquel is originally from Saudi Arabia and still spends her summers back home, and brought a unique perspective to our conversation. You can find the season one episode about fictional families in which she and Sharon joined us here.

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