Operation Diversity: A Preview

Posted by Raven M on 6:48 AM in diversity in literature, operation diversity, project, writing,

If you follow Patrice Caldwell, then you probably have read her latest What's Up Wednesday post. If you haven't read it, then I'll just reiterate what she said here.

Both of us are writers and avid readers. So being able to see from both sides of the spectrum, we came to an agreement that something needs to be done about the lack of diversity in literature for middle grade, young adult, and new adult readers. This is an important issue for us, so through a series of  emails, we planned a project that we are tentatively calling Operation Diversity.

Operation Diversity will be a group blog (think Publishing Crawl meets Diversity YA) and will hopefully be launched sometime in the near future. It will focus on diversity in MG, YA, & NA and it will give bloggers a chance, not only to share their respective writing journeys but will also (hopefully) open up dialogue about ALL kinds of diversity.

With that said, we are looking for bloggers ages 16 - 25 to be apart of this project. We are aware that this age group limits a lot of people from participating but we both talked about this and we thought it would be important to reach out to younger writers because their voices aren't heard that much and it would be cool to connect with other writers our age who feel strongly about diversity, write diverse stories, and want to seek publication one day. We are looking for bloggers from different backgrounds so please, if you're interested, feel free to contact me (raven.ashley187@yahoo.com) or Patrice.

Also, if you don't fit the age requirement, please don't feel like you can't participate in this endeavor. One of the reasons why I want to launch this blog is because I think it's important that EVERYONE talks about all aspects of diversity. Dialogue is important because sometimes dialogue moves people to ACT. So if you feel strongly about diversity please do not hesitate to contact me (again at: raven.ashley187@yahoo.com). I think it would be great to have guest posts from other people who might not be writers of the blog, but do think diversity is important. If you have any ideas as to what kind of topics you'd want to be discussed or questions you want to ask or if you just want to help us get the word across about Operation Diversity that would be fantastic.

I really don't want to exclude anyone from this project, so please don't be discouraged by the age criterion.

We don't know when this blog will launch because we're still in the planning stages, but we just wanted to get the word out there. Patrice and I are planning to post in-depth post on this project tomorrow afternoon so stay tuned!