Photo credits to Pettifoggist. 

Originally published on The Undefeated.

My mother and my father remember chatting with friends at a nondescript table at the 1989 American Library Association (ALA) annual conference. Sitting with them were Walter Dean Myers, Jim Haskins, Virginia Hamilton and her husband Arnold Adoff — all award-winning writers of fiction and nonfiction about the black experience.

For writers and editors, ALA was, and is, the place to be to pitch ideas, make deals and meet people in the publishing world.

As my parents and their friends shared stories and caught up, Haskins joked that if someone rolled a grenade under the table, black children’s literature would be set back several decades.

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