WOW Reads: Bonus - Reading Ambassadors on Outstanding International Books

Join the WOW Center Middle School and Teen Reading Ambassadors as we discuss the 2023 Outstanding International Books from the United States Board on Books for Young People (USBBY) and the International Board on Books for Young People's (IBBY) 2020 and 2022 Illustration Honor Book.

The Reading Ambassadors specifically mention the following books in this podcast:
This is Our Place by Vitor Martins (USBBY OIB)
Last Week by Bill Richardson and Emilie Leduc (USBBY OIB)
The Invisible by Tom Percival (IBBY Honor List - Illustration)

This podcast was recorded in the Digital Innovation and Learning Lab (DIALL) in the UArizona College of Education with assistance from the UA COE Tech Team.

Co-Producer: Rebecca Ballenger, WOW Center Associate Director
Audio Engineer: Liam Arias, Student Employee and Radio, TV, Film Major
Coordinator: Vianey Torres, WOW Student Employee and Nursing Major

For more information on the WOW Teen Reading Ambassadors (TRAP), visit wowlit.org.

We Can Promote Global Literature Together!

The Worlds of Words Reading Ambassador program is completely free for participants who receive a book for themselves and a book to share with their school librarian, ELA/English teacher, or other school entity. If you would like to support this program, please make a gift on-line through the University of Arizona Foundation.

Thank you for listening and keep reading!

Transcript

Rebecca: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to Wow Reads, a podcast of the worlds of Words Center of Global Literacies and Literatures. Today we talk to a mix of Middle School and Teen Reading Ambassadors about the International Board on Books for Young People and their honors lists, as well as the USBBY, United States Board on Books for Young People, Outstanding International Books. 

Echo: The Worlds of Words Center is committed to creating an international network of people who share the vision of bringing books and children together, thereby opening windows on the world. We encourage-we encourage thoughtful dialogue around the global literature so that children can reflect on their own cultural experience and connect the experiences of children across the globe.

Sophie: The WOW Center Reading Ambassador Program offers middle school and high school students a college reading experience within the University of Arizona College of Education that focuses on books for teens. Ambassadors learn about youth [00:01:00] literature under the direction of faculty and staff with expertise in children's literature, education, library science, and marketing.

Alessa: We respectfully acknowledge the University of Arizona is on the land and territories of the indigenous. Today, Arizona is home to 22 federally recognized tribes with Tucson being home to the O'Odham and the Yaqui. Committed to diversity and inclusion the university strives to build sustainable relationships with sovereign Native Nations and indigenous communities through education offerings, partnerships, and community service.

Rebecca: So let's do a little round of introductions. My name is Rebecca Ballenger. I'm the associate director at Worlds of Words. And, I run the Reading Ambassador programs. 

Echo: I'm Echo. 

Sophie: I'm Sophie. 

Alessa: And I'm Alessa. 

Rebecca: So we've just finished learning a little bit about the outstanding international books and um, [00:02:00] gosh, in any kind of number of ways, would anybody like to summarize that meeting? And I will preface that by saying we will put some notes and some links in our show notes or production notes so that everybody will be able to go and learn more about these organizations. But would anybody here like to talk briefly about what we did? 

Alessa: We just came from a meeting, talking about the winners for the 2023 outstanding international books.

Rebecca: That's correct. So we talked to Kathy Short and Holly Johnson, who had sat on the USBBY board to select these books to do this in the past, although they were not on this past...

Alessa: Past committee, they already had the idea of what the committee was doing and what the process is to choose books that are on the list.

Rebecca: Yeah. So we got to learn about the criterion. So let's start with you Echo. What did you think of the [00:03:00] books that we started with? The, the OIB books for the last year? 

Echo: I really love them because how diverse they were. And I wish I had got the books sooner cause I would've loved to read all of them, even the little kid ones. Because even like how, even though like they were meant for kids, the topics they had were like, even an adult would read it and be like, completely fascinated and love them. 

Rebecca: So you mean you would've liked to have been able to read through all the books...

Echo: Mm-hmm.

Rebecca: Before we met? And then when you're talking about the little kids, are you talking about the picture books primarily?

Echo: Yes.

Rebecca: Yeah. Okay. Sophie? 

Sophie: Um, I just liked how like they had like a whole different aesthetic to it. Like they were like, a lot of their drawings, the illustrations were more, they had more like, realism to it, I guess, and their topics were more like diverse. 

Rebecca: So that's interesting because we spent a lot of time talking about aesthetic and how a Western aesthetic is more [00:04:00] realistic. And then these international books were more abstract. Are you talking, when you say they're more realistic, do you mean in, the topics they're presenting? 

Sophie: Yes. And like the drawings, they're more sophisticated than like picture books that you would find here. 

Rebecca: Ah, sophisticated. Okay. So maybe more like something you would see in a museum?

Sophie: I guess.

Rebecca: Yeah. Okay. So was there a book that stood out for you in the, in the first set of books? 

Sophie: Um, no. I mean, I liked all of 'em. 

Rebecca: Alyssa, was there a book that stood out for you in the OIB books? 

Alessa: Yeah. It was called "Last Week" by Richardson, Bill. And it's pretty much breaking down what's happening with somebody passing, and in the book it's a grandmother passing and it's the daughter like counting down or the granddaughter counting down the days [00:05:00] of and the minutes and the hours and the seconds to when she no longer has her grandmother in her life. And that is something that you wouldn't see in a children's book or any other book because in my beliefs, the Western Ideal doesn't really like dealing with death or talking about death when it's being promoted to kids. 

Rebecca: Surely. Death is already sort of a taboo topic, but to talk about assisted death is, um, do you feel like it's an appropriate topic for young people?

Alessa: Yeah, because that's how you deal with big emotions, because if you don't expose it to them when they're younger or when they're growing up and they're realizing that there's so many different problems in the world, that when they're adults, they're not gonna know how to cope. They're not gonna know what to do or how to deal with the situation that this [00:06:00] character is in. 

Rebecca: Echo, did you have a particular book that stood out from that first set of books we looked at? 

Echo: I really liked, um, "This Is Our Place" by Victor Martinez, which is this house that got to be like the narrator, which is something that never really happens and it was about three people who lived in it, in a span of 10 different years, which was just really fun. You never read about like, like read about a house, 'cuz like houses are unmoving. Nothing really happens to it. Nothing changes, but the people always do. So it has like this big collection of different stories. So just reading it in like that point of view is pretty cool. 

Rebecca: So after we got to look at the outstanding international books, then we looked at the IBBY books. And so just for some background, while a US-based group looks at the OIB books, the IBBY books are nominated by the home countries. So every [00:07:00] country that is a member of IBBY will put forward their best book in writing, their best book in illustration, and their best book in translation. We looked at the illustrated books from 2022 and 2020. Sophie, I think I'll start with you again. Of the books that were on the table at the second part of our meeting, did one of those stand out to you?

Sophie: I can't remember a certain one, but I just liked how like they had like a different like feel to it and look to it than like books that you would find here.

Rebecca: So in your experience when you were looking at picture books when you were younger, but also we saw middle grade books and YA too, how do they differ from what you've already experienced? 

Sophie: The illustrations and the topics that they deal with are pretty different than like what you would find here. Like they're all like, I guess like all like picture books are like, happy ending or like [00:08:00] happily-ever-after endings and like the books, like they're like, they don't deal with that. They have like different topics and like different like types of illustrations, I guess. 

Rebecca: And open endings as well. Yes. Yeah. Excellent. Alessa of those books, did you, of the second set of books, the IBBY books, did you have one that stood out? 

Alessa: Uh, I did. I, it was called "The Invisible." I don't remember who the author was, but the reason it stands out to me is because, like Sophia said, it wasn't a happily ever after situation. It was very open-ending because it was about a child knowing that she lives in poverty and being pretty much homeless at one point. She felt like no one saw her and no one, no one knew she was there. Like if she wasn't important and she didn't matter, but she found something that mattered to her, which was helping people, and that gave her her self-identity again.

Alessa: And it wasn't just [00:09:00] being homeless, it wasn't just being a poor girl. It was something more than that. And that's what she was very proud. 

Rebecca: So if you had had books like these when you were younger, how do you think that would have affected your life? 

Alessa: I would've been better with communication skills and coping mechanisms because growing up I never had a own home with my family. I was always living with family. Tias, aunts, uncles, and it was just always moving around for me. I never stayed in one spot for so long until I was a lot older, and if I had these, I would have known more of what's going on and not just be so accepting of where I was, not just being so okay with always being with different people, because then I would have realized the situation I was in and how I could have made a better change.

Rebecca: That's powerful. Thank you for sharing that. [00:10:00] Echo, did a book stand out for you?

Echo: Me and Alyssa were reading the same book, so I also share the same book. And I loved it because as like she was like turning invisible where she could no longer see herself, and as she walked around, she saw other people who were also invisible like her. And then once she found out like she liked helping people, she slowly came. And as she helped out, they were solely coming back with her. So by the end of the book, they were all like bright and colorful. They were all like, they were all fully there. Again, they were all happy and it was just, I loved it.

Rebecca: Okay, so one last round of questions, and then we'll close up the podcast. I'm curious to know, we touched a little bit in our meetings about, sort of the obstacles for these books to be published in the US and Sophie, you hit on a lot of the reasons why like because in the US, we prefer these happily ever after endings. Do [00:11:00] you guys remember some of the other possible reasons why we might not have these books available to US readers? 

Echo: They said a lot of it was 'cuz of the art style. The art style. They hit a lot on that. And then, We tend to focus a lot more. Well, the Western eye seems to focus a lot more on main characters who tend to be more white and more times tend to be males. So when it comes to people who are people of color, they don't tend to like those as much. 

Rebecca: So there's not much of a market in the US for these books. Yeah. 

Alessa: Um, one thing I heard is that there is an aesthetic to it. It has to be. For certain age levels, it has to be like this and stay like this. While in other countries it's not like that because they want those age levels to be, um, exposed to more adult topics in the Western ideals. And they are [00:12:00] not okay with that because we're, it's too early for them or it's not the proper topic or appropriate topic for their age group, which I don't generally agree with because you don't know what a child can handle. And then the librarian from Texas who was there, she said that when she would put setups, it was for these books. No child wanted them. No child felt that that was something that they could relate to and they would wanna go find a different book that had more of the diversity that they expected from these books. 

Rebecca: And so young people in the United States, well, young people like you maybe are not interested in looking at picture books because we feel like that they're too young for us, is one of the things that came up. And also ironically, that these books had too much text. So it's funny that we would see international [00:13:00] books maybe having too much text and then our population looking at that and saying, uh, it's a picture book, so it's for people younger than me. It'll be interesting to to know if any of those suppositions are true. Any last thoughts before we close up our podcast? All right. Well then I'm going to open it up for input from everybody else. We're halfway through our first, our very first season, our inaugural season of Wow Reads. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for sticking with us. If any of our listeners have questions or suggestions, recommendations, we would love to hear them. You can email those to wow@arizona.edu. That's w o w dot A R I Z O N A dot edu. I hope I spelled Arizona right. It felt weird coming outta my mouth. I want to give a special thank you and shout out to Liam Arias our production editor, our sound [00:14:00] engineer, our all around general suave guy. I want to also thank the DIALL lab, the digital innovation and learning lab. I guess DIALL lab is a little redundant since lab is already in there, in the University of Arizona College of Education.