Last week to celebrate Woman’s History Month several Youtube personalities created videos highlighting some of the issues with America’s gender norms.
One of the vloggers, Kristina Horner, created a video about how YA literature has become gendered. From different covers to how we label genre’s there are many ways subtle clues are sent to potential readers about what books they are meant to read.
Part of the vlog was inspired by Maureen Johnson’s article in Huffington Post talking about how boys were excluded from reading her books and attending author visits.
Goodreads released an infograph last year indicated that 80% of a female author’s readers will be woman. Remembering the goodread article, after watching the video I had a conversation with my husband who is a fantasy/SciFi reader. We went through our reading lists from the past year and discovered that I’d read mostly female authors and he’d read mostly male. Of the woman authors he did read, they were books I had recommended to him.
I realized that not only should I be more proactive in promoting good books to my teens, but maybe I should create a blind date with a book that highlights female authors. My library did something like this for Valentine’s day for adults, and the display was frequently desolate since everyone kept taking the books home.
If nothing else, I plan to share books written by female authors with my coworkers, so they can recommend them in reader’s advisory moments.
The female authors I read in 2014:
- Leigh Bardugo
- Holly Black
- Gail Carriger
- Rae Carson
- Kiera Cass
- Joelle Charbonneau
- Rosamund Hodge
- A.G. Howard
- Amie Kaufman
- Lucy Knisley
- Melina Marchetta
- Lauren Oliver
- Liz Prince
- Rainbow Rowell
- Maria Semple
- G. Willow Wilson
