Alt Kid Lit

Contributions by Kristopher Alexander Amanda K. Allen Brianna Anderson Catherine Burwell Katharine Capshaw Negin Dahya Gabriel Duckels Paige Gray Gabrielle Atwood Halko Natasha Hurley Kenneth B. Kidd Erica Law-Montes Derritt Mason Brandon Murakami Tehmina Pirzada Cristina Rhodes Cristina Rivera Jakob Rosendal TreaAndrea M. Russworm Vivek Shraya Victoria Ford Smith Joshua Whitehead and Shuyin Yu <p/> How do we think about children's and young adult literature? Children's literature is often defined through audience so what happens when children are drawn to and claim genres not built expressly for them? To what extent do canonical formations tend to overwrite or obscure less visible efforts to create and promote material for the young? These are the driving questions of <i>Alt Kid Lit: What Children's Literature Might Be. </i> <p/> Contributors to the volume offer theoretical meditations on the category of children's and young adult literature as well as case studies of materials that complicate our understanding of such. Chapters attend to a diverse array of subjects including the non-places of children's literature; child mediums; Black theater for children; children's interpretive drawings; fanfiction; Latinx Indigenous and silkpunk speculative fiction; environmental zines; sh?nen anime; Jim Henson's <i>The Dark Crystal</i>; South Asian television; and emergency children's literature. The book also features interviews with two experimental writers about genre and alt-publishing and a roundtable conversation on video games and children's digital engagements. Building on diverse approaches including queer theory and postcolonial studies <i>Alt Kid Lit </i>shines light on materials methodologies and epistemologies that are sometimes underacknowledged in the field of children's and young adult literature studies.