I don’t think any of our bookshelves are complete yet. I think that we’re in a moment where we are inviting a lot of voices to publishing, that were not invited before, that were specifically excluded before. And so one of the delights is to see historical fiction opening up, to see Native fiction and Latinx fiction and Black American history reflected in our books in more expansive, deeper ways then we’ve seen in the past.
Our historical cannon has tended to be a little bit about the Revolutionary War, a little bit about the Civil War, maybe a little bit about World War Two and then some Civil Rights thrown in without a lot of exploration of sort of the individual lives and experiences of people who were not white, who were not heroic in the grand way we think of heroes, right? People who changed the world and might have a biography written about them.
It’s just as powerful to read about a young person who stood up for what they believed in in a really difficult time. And so I think we’re seeing a lot more of those kinds of narratives. We’re seeing a lot more narratives that celebrate regular people who stood up for something important. And often those people were non-white, often those people, you know, were marginalized in one way or another.
And so we’re seeing more stories about marginalized people; people who are part of historically marginalized communities being able to tell their story. And for me that just expands our bookshelves enormously.
