In celebration of Children’s Book Week, I had the opportunity to interview Gene Luen Yang, National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. He’s also the author of American Born Chinese, Secret Coders, Boxers & Saints, and recently finished his stint writing DC Comics’ Superman. I could go on and on, but instead I’ll stop myself here and let you read the interview.
That said, my old college professor Brian Harvey argues that Logo is as robust as any language out there. He wrote multiple books about it. If you have any interest in the language beyond the turtle, you ought to check them out.
In high school, I used Pascal. In college, it was mostly C. Professionally, I used C and Visual Basic, but that was a long, long time ago.
As I teacher, I taught Pascal, C++, and Java. Of the three, I liked teaching C++ the best, though my knowledge of the language isn’t very deep.
Nowadays, I’m pretty out of date. I haven’t programmed professionally in almost two decades. Luckily, though, most of the building blocks are the same regardless of what language you use.
Here’s one realization that has helped me: Cultures are living things. They change and grow. The Asia that my parents left, the one in their memories, the one they told me about in their stories, no longer exists. So what is the “Old World”, exactly?
Tradition is important. It ought to inform us. It ought to have a place in the conversation. But we can’t be completely beholden to it. After all, the children of the folks who didn’t emigrate aren’t completely beholden to it, so why should we be?
Derek Kirk Kim’s Same Difference won all three comics industry awards for a reason. He perfectly captures what it was like to come of age in the nineties.
Jason Shiga’s Meanwhile is one of the most inventive graphic novels in existence.
Lynda Barry’s One Hundred Demons is a huge influence on me.
If you have an interest at all in the Asian American experience–heck, in the human experience–you need to read Adrian Tomine’s Shortcomings.
I love the novels of David Yoo and Mike Jung. Both of them expertly blend drama with humor. Mitali Perkins, an accomplished author in her own right, put together an anthology about living in two cultures called Open Mic.
My family, especially my wife, have been incredibly supportive. My wife is heavily involved in promoting reading and writing at our kids’ school, so what I’m doing goes hand-in-hand with what she’s doing.
I’ve heard from a few of my old students. They’re happy for me. I taught for seventeen years, so many of my students are older than I was when I taught them. Discovering that those goofy teenagers from a decade ago have grown into wonderful, functional adults has been deeply satisfying.
I’ve heard from a number of librarians and teachers who have issued the challenge to their students, and the results have been better than I could have imagines. For instance, at Live Oak School in San Francisco, librarian Melissa McAvoy created a Reading Without Walls program that resulted in over 100 books being read!
Right now, the Children’s Book Council, First Second Books, and I are working on materials to help teachers and librarians present the challenge to their students. We’re going to have it ready before the beginning of the 2016-2017 school year.
I’ve started a Reading Without Walls monthly podcast with Reading Rockets.
I do a monthly column about the creative process for Panels.net. Here’s the latest.
And I’m going to do a monthly column about what I’m reading. That will be up soon.
So there you have it. National Ambassador Gene Luen Yang sure is busy, and I know I appreciate the work he’s doing to bring children’s literature into focus.
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