I’m thinking about the writers who have come before me. I’m thinking about Nikky Finney. I’m thinking about Audre Lorde. I’m thinking about James Baldwin. I’m thinking about Toni Morrison. I’m thinking about the people who have written because they needed to break down barriers and create access and create change.

Alice Walker writes, “To acknowledge our ancestors means we are aware that we did not make ourselves.” I often refer to my mother, grandmother, and ancestors as people who survived the unsurvivable. This makes my existence a miraculous one. Every child of a diaspora, every marginalized person has survived a global project which intended to kill them. I want people to remember that they are not, and have never been, alone. Everyone who knows me knows I talk to my ancestors all the time. I see and feel them everywhere because I remember to look for them, and in so doing, I remember myself.

The “Writing and Illustrating Picture Books” roundtable, moderated by Cheryl Willis Hudson of Just Us Books, provided a fun and insightful look into the creative process behind picture books. Joanna Cardenas from Viking / Penguin Random House detailed the publishing process for writers and illustrators, revealing that oftentimes the two parties do not have direct communication but collaborate through the book’s editor. This helps preserve the creative license of the illustrator without the writer controlling the process.

As a writer who began in spoken-word, I believed for too long that to write in standard form (i.e. sonnets, sestinas, etc.) was to engage in white literary vehicles antithetical to my existence as a writer of color. At a recent lecture by Natasha Trethewey, she argued for poets of color to embrace white traditional forms as one of many ways to subvert the white canon.

Attending this conference catalyzed my outlook on my life as a young Korean-American woman and poet. Visibility is a concept thrown around frequently in the liberal sphere, but I cannot tell you how important it was to see people who looked like me, succeeding.

Xenophobia doesn’t always look like a monument of shame. It doesn’t always look like ridicule and jeering. It looks like a room full of people and nobody to sit with. It looks like conversations buzzing all around me with no way in. It looks like one person at a time, taking notice of the ways in which I differ, and expressing quiet disinterest and revulsion. No one big public humiliation. Many small, private disappointments.

Kuwento: Lost Things began in 2011 as a search, an obsession, a need to excavate the stories our families told us of anitos (deities) and engkantos (spirits). When co-editor Rachelle Cruz and I first indulged in the idea of curating an anthology on Philippine myths, we were struck at how diverse and varied the retellings were: Was the Aswang a bat-like vampire woman? Or was she a shape-shifting beast, or a giant black bird with a long, fetus-eating tongue? We understood that the stories passed on to us from our fathers and mothers were varied but also culturally inherited. It was as if our bodies knew them, and knew them well.

Kweli readers can get a special 30% off discount on all print and e-book Lee & Low/Tu Books titles by going to www.leeandlow.com and entering code KWELI at checkout. If you’re looking for magical realism, try SUMMER OF THE MARIPOSAS by Guadalupe Garcia McCall. Dystopia: try  TANKBORN by Karen Sandler. Post-apocalyptic Apache steampunk? KILLER OF ENEMIES by Joseph Bruchac, and its e-book novella prequel, ROSE EAGLE.

You gave me a nice segue to my next question which is what are some of the specific things that you are looking for in submissions now, if you’re open to submissions? Are there any particular stories you’d be really excited to see? Then on the flip side, what are some of your pet peeves when it comes to submissions?

Today’s conference is about diversity in storytelling and I am sort of curious about what that word “diversity” means to all of you now. I think that it can mean a lot of different things to different people. We can be talking about diversity in terms of race, we could be talking about cultural diversity. We could be talking about diversity in forms of storytelling. So what does diversity mean to you?