Dear Reader: A Girl’’s Library Love Letter to Her Future Self

A young Black girl pens a love letter to libraries and books, powerfully expressing the need to see herself represented in stories. From the author that brought you M Is for Melanin.

＂A rousing call to action for more racially diverse children’s literature.＂ -Kirkus Reviews, STARRED REVIEW

There was just this one thing, this nagging suspicion, that I didn’t meet the criteria for a heroine’s condition.

In the books that I read, an absence of melanin was a clear omission.

A voracious young reader loves nothing more than going to the library and poring through books all day, making friends with characters and going off on exciting adventures with them. However, the more she reads, the more she notices that most of the books don’t have characters of color, and the only ones that do tell about the most painful parts of their history. Where are the Black heroines with Afros exploring other planets and the superheroes with ’locs saving the day?

Tiffany Rose is a left-handed illustrator and author who’s currently living and working in China. She’s a lover of coffee, wanderlust, massive curly Afros, and children being their imaginative, quirky, free selves. She is a full-time teacher, part-time author/illustrator, and world traveler. Rose remembers what it was like as a brown child not seeing herself reflected in the books and characters she loved so dearly, and has been inspired to create art and meaningful stories, like this book and her debut, M Is for Melanin, so that underrepresented children can see themselves in books. Pencil in hand, she’s changing that percentage one illustration at a time.