Celebrating Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month and Why Heritage Month Celebrations Help Us to Diversify All of Our Displays

It is Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month [AAPI] and there are many ways for you to celebrate at your library. For example, just about every resource has book lists you can use to highlight AAPI authors.  If you want to click here you can run a search for the most popular. 

A few of my favorites over the last couple of years with links to my reviews are:

• Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner
• Severance by Ling Ma [which if you have been to any of my trainings you have heard about because I use it as an example]
• Black Cranes: Tales of Unquiet Women edited by Lee Murray and Geneve Flynn [I gave this a STAR review in LJ and it went on to win the Bram Stoker Award for Best Anthology last year]
• The Fervor by Alma Katsu [STAR in LJ]

There are so many more I could list, but today I wanted to write a little more about the author of that last book-- The Fervor-- Alma Katsu. By now readers of this blog should be aware that I am working with Katsu all year as our 2022 Summer Scares spokesperson. When Konrad and I approached her back in the late summer of 2021 to ask if she would sign on for this gig, we talked about what her "platform" [for lack of a better term] would be. With The Fervor set to release in April 2022, we talked about how this would be the first of her books where she would explore a main character who was Japanese American, like herself. I asked her if she would be comfortable using that as a jumping off point to talk about diversity in Horror. She agreed.

To support this work, Katsu and I did this interview in the January issue of Library Journal, and we made this video for my Actively Anti-Racist Service to Leisure Readers PLA pre conference. The video in particular [25 mins] is all about this topic and racism in general.

With the release of The Fervor, Katsu also wrote this excellent essay for CrimeReads, "Why I Finally Decided to Write a Main Character Who Shares My Ethnicity." This essay is a must read, for everyone who does RA or collection development, even if you are not going to read the book. The work Katsu is doing in support of The Fervor, her openness in having conversations about marginalization, representation, and racism are important conversations for all of us to be a part of. 

So yes, get up some AAPI displays and make lists of titles or share ones made by others. But also, spend some time to understand why celebrating Heritage months matters. Share these articles, interviews, and videos with your patrons as well. 

And then please, don't forget the excellent books you pull for AAPI month, or whatever month it is, they need to be used in other displays throughout the year because Crying in H Mart can be used on a memoir displays, books about food display, or even books by musicians display as well. And The Fervor works for Horror, books about WWII, historical fiction, books about journalist [today is World Press Freedom day as well, which is why I mention it].

You get the point. Books by marginalized voices are not a genre. Each title fits into multiple genres and or appeal categories. As we work to make all of our displays more inclusive, we should use these Heritage months to help us identify what we have by a specific group of authors. It should educate us on the breadth of our holdings [or conversely, allow us to see gaps which we can work to fill]. As we pull these titles for displays or lists, we should then note what other categories they would fit into and use them again, in non identity based displays. 

These Heritage months both highlight the contributions of a group of people AND allow us to get a handle on our holdings by marginalized voices and alert ourselves to great titles we should be using on general displays. You have no excuse not to diversify all of your displays because Heritage month celebrations allow you to know about more diverse titles.

One final note about AAPI month, please remember that this month celebrates Asian American and Pacific Islander Month. Unfortunately, I have already seen some AAPI lists that include authors that are Asian. Please don't do this.