![\"Danielle](\"http:\/\/www.糖心传媒.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/01\/clayton.jpg\")
\nWhen children\u2019s author Dhonielle Clayton M.A. \u201909\/children\u2019s literature was working as a school librarian and teacher in Harlem a few years ago, she could not find the diverse books she was looking for\u2014so she ended up writing one herself.<\/p>\n
That young adult book, Tiny Pretty Things<\/em>, cowritten in 2015 with her friend and business partner Sona Charaipotra, tells the stories of a diverse group of young women, including an African American lead character, at an elite ballet boarding school and the competitive, often cruel world in which they live.<\/p>\n But the point is that it is not a story about<\/em> diversity, explained Clayton, 36, speaking recently by phone from her home in New York City. \u201cIt\u2019s a story that includes<\/em> diversity,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s about ballet and that world and about these diverse characters just living their lives.\u201d<\/p>\n In that cutthroat world, female bodies are a commodity, and true friendship is rare and endangered. Clayton observed these realities as an English teacher at a ballet boarding school back home in the Washington, D.C., area, during the years she studied at Hollins in the summer.<\/p>\n Those sad realities for some of her students\u2014competition, isolation, and mistrust among women\u2014were markedly different from her own, especially during her time at Hollins.<\/p>\n \u201cI love Hollins, and I thought, \u2018This is where I need to be,\u2019\u201d she said about arriving in 2005, just after earning a B.A. in English from Wake Forest University. She developed supportive, nurturing female friendships at Hollins, and she will return to campus as a faculty member in the graduate program in children\u2019s literature in summer 2020.<\/p>\n Tiny Pretty Things<\/em> was so successful that she and Charaipotra wrote a sequel, Shiny Broken Pieces<\/em>, in 2016, also to great acclaim. Netflix has since created a series, Tiny Pretty Things<\/em>, based on the books. Ten hour-long episodes are scheduled to air sometime in 2020.<\/p>\n The pair\u2019s creative friendship began when they met at the New School in New York, in the M.F.A. program in creative writing. Clayton, who earned her degree there in 2012, had moved to New York and wanted to better understand the canon of children\u2019s literature and learn the mechanics of writing, intending to remain a librarian.<\/p>\n Charaipotra, an Indian American, told Clayton that, until college, she had never seen a book that featured someone who looked like her. And she was unable to find diverse picture books for her infant daughter.<\/p>\n \u201cWe both said that people don\u2019t know what to do with characters that aren\u2019t like them,\u201d Clayton said. \u201cSo often if there is diversity, it\u2019s all about their struggle. There is a place for those stories, of course, but we also wanted other books to balance that, stories that showed them just living their lives.\u201d<\/p>\n She recalled her days teaching in Harlem at a Title I school. \u201cI had trouble finding books to teach with diversity and that were engaging,\u201d she said. \u201cSo many of my students spoke Spanish, and some spoke four languages, and they were not reflected in the books we had available.\u201d<\/p>\n She and Charaipotra decided to form a creative development company, Cake Literary, for publishing, packaging, and marketing diverse books and other materials. But first they wanted to write a book to demonstrate what kind of diversity they sought, and they began their collaboration. They are also working on a third book, Rumor Game<\/em>, about the power of rumors to harm lives.<\/p>\n Clayton is also the chief operating officer of the nonprofit organization We Need Diverse Books, whose mission is to spark change in the publishing industry and \u201cto help produce and promote literature that reflects and honors the lives of all young people.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cEvery kid deserves to be the hero of the story, and not just have it be about the pain of their background,\u201d Clayton said.<\/p>\n She has written two young adult fantasy novels on her own, The Belles<\/em> (2018) and The Everlasting Rose<\/em> (2019). Both are about the lives of women in a place called Orl\u00e9ans, a dangerous world of beauty, power, and changing identity, and about who gets to decide who is beautiful, often at a high cost.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m asking the question, \u2018What are we willing to do to ourselves in order to be considered beautiful?\u2019\u201d Clayton said. \u201cThe way you look determines a lot of things. This is true in real life. But in a fantasy, it\u2019s exaggerated and darker.\u201d<\/p>\n She has also published short stories of loss, love, fear, and courage in three anthologies. They include: \u201cDear Nora James, You Know Nothing About Love,\u201d in Unbroken: 13 Stories Starring Disabled Teens<\/em> (2018); \u201cThe Way We Love Here\u201d in Meet Cute: Some People Are Destined to Meet<\/em> (2018); and \u201cThe Trouble With Drowning,\u201d in Black Enough: Stories of Being Young and Black in America<\/em> (2019).<\/p>\n \u201cMy goal as a writer is to ask the hard questions, not to provide answers,\u201d she said. \u201cThat\u2019s the teacher in me: to ask readers what is important to them.\u201d<\/p>\n Karen Adams is a Roanoke writer.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Dhonielle Clayton M.A. \u201909 writes about diversity, belonging, and what matters. By Karen Adams M.A. \u201993 English and creative writing; M.A. \u201900, M.F.A.\u201910 children\u2019s literature When children\u2019s author Dhonielle Clayton M.A. \u201909\/children\u2019s literature was working as a school librarian and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8973,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[78],"class_list":["post-8915","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","tag-winter-2020"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.糖心传媒.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8915","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.糖心传媒.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.糖心传媒.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.糖心传媒.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.糖心传媒.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8915"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.糖心传媒.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8915\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8917,"href":"https:\/\/www.糖心传媒.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8915\/revisions\/8917"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.糖心传媒.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8973"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.糖心传媒.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.糖心传媒.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.糖心传媒.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}