Children's and Young Adult Literature Commons^™

Representation Matters: African American Female Readers’ Perceptions Of Young Adult Literature, Asia Harden

Honors Theses

In 2019, only 6% of U.S. children’s books published were written by black authors. This portion of the publishing industry, and particularly the category of young adult literature (YA) has room for improvement when it comes to African American representation. To identify how this lack of representation affects readers, this study was broken into two parts which resulted in obtaining the African American female YA author perspective, as well as African American female readers. J. Elle and Kristina Forest were interviewed in the first portion of the study, and three focus groups were conducted in the second study with 13 …