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This special issue of the Journal of Children's Literature (JCL) focuses on research, scholarship, and current conversations about the complexities of the #OwnVoices movement.
AS MANY OF OUR READERS will already know, the #OwnVoices hashtag was created on Twitter by Corinne Duyvis, an author of young adult literature, to refer to "kidlit about diverse characters written by authors from that same diverse group" (Duyvis, 2015). Over the past five years, #OwnVoices has become a movement in the field of youth literature. This special issue of the Journal of Children's Literature (JCL) focuses on research, scholarship, and current conversations about the complexities of the #OwnVoices movement.
As the articles, commentaries, and conversations in this issue demonstrate, #OwnVoices is not without its complexities and limitations. In an interview with Kara Yorio (2019), Ellen Oh articulates some of these challenges, saying, "I think the term OwnVoices has become an unintentional challenge to all writers.... No writer is perfect. We are all human, and even at our best, we can still make mistakes." At its core, however, is a call to privilege the voices of those who have been traditionally marginalized in publishing. The purpose of this issue is not to cast a value judgment on the movement. Instead, we hope to build upon ongoing work being done by educators, academics, and individuals involved in the creation and publishing of children's books. We hope this issue will serve as a launching point to push these important conversations forward and support the field as we move forward and take action.
We view this special issue as being in conversation, for example, with the inaugural issue of Research on Diversity in Youth Literature (Halko & Dahlen, 2018), which created a space in which #OwnVoices scholars responded to Rudine Sims Bishop's (1990) influential metaphor about literature functioning as mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors. We also view this issue of JCL and the #OwnVoices movement as building upon ongoing conversations in the field of children's literature centered on issues of accuracy, authenticity, and politics in the sharing and telling of stories. Some of these discussions have occurred within the pages of the Journal...