![]() ![]() We Are Girls is for third- through eighth-grade girls and their parents. This year, the conference’s theme is “Tell Your Story,” and it has expanded to be both the Austin Conference at Austin High and, now, a Houston conference at the Young Women’s College Preparatory Academy on the same day. Gonzalez is one of the keynote speakers at Girls Empowerment Network Austin’s We Are Girls Conference on Nov. Unless a grown-up has taken special care in curating a diverse library of voices, kids are still seeing mostly white faces in their books, she says. “I needed to see myself in books,” she says.Įven though authors, teachers and librarians have been talking about the need for more diverse characters in children’s literature for decades, Gonzalez - as an author, illustrator, educator and mother of a 2-year-old daughter - still sees a gap in what kids are exposed to. She remembers drawing a “big, brown Chicana face,” on the back of books. Half her family spoke English half spoke Spanish, but she spoke only English. Her mother was white her father was Mexican. As a Chicana, “I didn’t see myself reflected in a children’s book,” she says. Maya Christine Gonzalez couldn’t find herself in the stories she read as a child. ![]()
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