We Need Diverse Books: Why Diversity Matters for Everyone

Throughout October, we’ll be partnering with We Need Diverse Books to bring you a series of blog posts full of helpful advice, tips, and suggestions for writing diversity convincingly and respectfully in your fiction—from people who know what they’re talking about. Today, Marieke Nijkamp shares why diversity matters for everyone:

Why does diversity matter? The answer to that question should be simple and straightforward: because everyone deserves to be a hero. Because everyone deserves to be seen. Because representation matters.

Junot Díaz famously said: “If you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves.”

Yet this is exactly what the vast majority of our stories does, whether intentionally or not. In a time when—in the US—more than half of the children born will be non-white, less than ten percent of books published are about characters of color or written by people of color. And while one out of five teens will deal with a serious debilitating mental illness, perhaps only one out of twenty books even recognizes mental illnesses exist…

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