Thread by @yuyimorales

Reading this while I am finding my way back home, I have so many thoughts and feelings about this weekend at #ALAAAC19. These were days of many emotions for me, but mostly it was just a few days of a journey that started a while ago and continues crazyquiltedi.blog/2019/06/26/how…

I realize how I too don’t know how to respond to people thanking me for my work; do they know how much I love to do what I do? When I make my books I am safe and warm at my studio. I am fed, I am healthy, I am loved and my life is not in danger.

I am breathing and my heart beats, and then I come to places and people thank me, there is love for my work. I receive an award, people buy my book, and in the middle of all these I realize of a certain fallacy that plays in my life. In many author’s lives.

And the fallacy is that while I am going around being recognized for a book I made for children, the children I make my work for are not safe, they are not warm, nor healthy, nor taken care of, nor welcomed, nor honored, nor in the arms of those who love them.

In fact these children are being denigrated, violated, treated as if they are less and not worthy of care because...I can’t even explain the why of this. What is happening to children has no explanation.
I am very thankful for the love and recognition to my work, yet...

...I can’t go along with a system that cheers for books so that some of us, authors, can pat our own backs and feel like we have made it—we, the stars of the children’s book world who, one day, might even receive a call that changes our lives, our dream come true!—While children

...are being punished for existing. What good are our books & “success” if what they won’t change is the lives of children? What good is the recognition of authors, all of us adults capable of changing our own lives, if the ones who won’t be honored are the ones we work for?

I cheer for children today. I want to put together a committee of people to call them right now and tell them, “I have the most fantastic news in the world: you are safe, you are welcomed, you are loved. We have been waiting for you!”

... And then we will cry and will say thank you, thank you, thank you, little ones, we could never been thankful enough for a life where we make books for you.