Critical Love Book Group: A 2022 Resolution to Read More Young Adult Literature

This winter-spring, the OSU Writing Project is offering an online professional development and would like to invite you, even if you are not in Oklahoma, to register for this online experience. Here is the description:

For pre-service, inservice, & veteran teachers who love reading and learning through literature. For educators who want to support students and families by making classroom libraries and curriculum more inclusive-affirming of students’ intersecting identities. This monthly book group (January-June, 2022) is a place to ignite thoughtful conversation about young adult literature informed by Dr. Yolanda Sealy-Ruiz’s (2020) Six Components to Racial Literacy Development. Your registration fee of $35 is a commitment to attend the conversations and for your PD certificate of 6 hours. You will buy from a store or reserve from your library the selected books. We will meet once a month via Zoom for an hour to discuss the texts, which will include extensions into ideas for sharing literature with students and studying of author’s craft. Respectful, invitational dialogue is expected of all participants.

We are going to read with a lens of what Dr. Yolanda Sealy-Ruiz named racial literacy development, which includes historical awareness of the forces that shape the society we live in along with critical humility or how we can “remain open to understanding the limits of our own worldviews & ideologies” and toward critical love or “a profound ethical commitment to caring.” We want to center love as transformative, recognizing harm but noticing the ways we heal and feel joy through young adult literature. Thus, our focus is on authors’ craft and celebrating beautifully crafted passages in the texts that represent intersecting identities.

Here is the book list. Notice, there are several verse novels listed in April, so you can choose any or all. Again, it will be up to you to acquire these books in the medium you prefer. We hope you will consider your local library and/or a local Black-owned bookstore.

All meetings are Sundays, 6:00-7:00pm CT.

Dates & Books

January 16

Up All Night by Laura Silverman anthology; 9781643750415, July 2021, 352 pages (anthology)

February 20

The Other Talk: Reckoning with Our White Privilege by Brendan Kiely; 9781534494046, September 2021, 272 pages (nonfiction)

March 20

Firekeeper’s Daughter by Angeline Boulley; 9781250766564, March 2021, 496 pages (mystery)

April 24, verse novel selections for National Poetry Month

Home Is Not A Country by Safia Elhillo, 9780593177051, March 2021, 224 pages
Me Moth) by Amber McBride; 9781250780362, August 2021, 256 pages
When We Make It by Elizabet Velasquez; 9780593324486, September 2021, 384 pages