A timely group of essays that wrestles with what children’s literature is and who it is made for

Kenneth B. Kidd is professor of English at University of Florida. He is author of three books, most recently Theory for Beginners: Children’s Literature as Critical Thought, and coeditor of four essay collections, most recently (with Derritt Mason) Queer as Camp: Essays on Summer, Style, and Sexuality. With Elizabeth Marshall, he coedits Routledge's Children's Literature and Culture series.

Kenneth B. Kidd's profile page

Derritt Mason is associate professor of English at the University of Calgary. They are author of Queer Anxieties of Young Adult Literature and Culture and coeditor of Queer as Camp: Essays on Summer, Style, and Sexuality.

Derritt Mason's profile page

Alt Kid Lit is precisely what the field of children’s and young adult literature scholarship needs: a bold, provocative, and exciting collection of essays that embrace nuanced, self-interrogating perspectives. It takes a necessary cannon to the concept of the canon.

Katharine Slater, associate professor of English at Rowan University

A vital provocation for scholars of children’s and young adult literature, in which twenty-three sharp thinkers challenge us to expand our definitions, center the underrepresented, and redraw the boundaries that haunt the field. As the essays in Alt Kid Lit demonstrate, if you want to change the paradigm, you first need to take the risks that lead to new ways of thinking. So. Accept that challenge. Start by reading this book.

Philip Nel, author of Was the Cat in the Hat Black? The Hidden Racism of Children’s Literature, and the Need for Diverse Books

Alt Kid Lit asks us to think nimbly as it explores and challenges the borders of an evolving field, the study of texts for young people. This collection entices readers to consider the ways in which we delineate our discipline, what counts as scholarship, what makes a text worthy of critical attention, and which texts and young people are relegated to the margins. In the process, it complicates existing definitions of child agency, authorship, and readership by offering up new approaches and modes of thinking that expand, nuance, and trouble current assumptions about young people’s texts and cultures.

Annette Wannamaker, coordinator of the Children’s Literature Program at Eastern Michigan University