Author Meg Medina, the 2023-24 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature (Photo by Scott Elmquist)
Acclaimed author and Henrico resident Meg Medina, who won the 2019 Newbery Medal for excellence in children’s literature, today was named National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature for 2023-24 by the U.S. Library of Congress. Medina’s most recent book, “Merci Suárez Plays It Cool,” was published in August 2022, concluding her middle-school trilogy. Medina, who has also written picture books and fiction for older teens, will travel throughout the United States during her tenure, sharing her platform “¡Cuéntame!: Let’s Talk Books.”
“I’m interested in reconnecting how kids talk of books and reconnect with reading not just as a subject in school, even though that’s important, too,” Medina says. “What I’m after is reading for joy and for passion, and reading as a way for families to connect and kids to connect. When you read something great and tell someone about a book, you’re telling them about yourself, what excites you, the things you love and the things that are interesting to you. You’re telling them that to connect.”
Medina will meet with children at every grade level for conversations about the books they love to read, encouraging them to move beyond talking about a book’s title and basic plot points to how it made them feel or how it’s similar — or dissimilar — to their own lives. It’s the same approach she took last summer when she partnered with the Henrico County Public Library system to visit every county library branch for a series of meetings with tweens called “Open Book.” Medina offered a list of summer reading books and asked participants to share what they were reading. “I wanted to bring books to kids that I [was] really excited about, maybe authors they weren’t familiar with,” she says. “It was really fun. ¡Cuéntame! is that on steroids; we’re growing it for the whole country.”
The ambassador program is jointly sponsored by the Library of Congress and Every Child a Reader, a national nonprofit organization dedicated to inspiring reading in children. Medina, a Cuban American raised in Queens, New York, will be the eighth National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature and the first Latina to hold the post. She succeeds Jason Reynolds, who served from 2020 to 2022. (Reynolds had a three-year term because of the COVID-19 pandemic.)
Clay Smith, director of library initiatives for the Library of Congress, says ambassadors are uniformly well respected for their unique contributions to the literary arts. They also have to be able to speak to others about reading and writing, and to engage with children in particular. That’s where Medina shines, he says. “Her work has a very immediate style; she has a lot of verve,” Smith says. “She knows how kids think and how they talk. Even among children’s writers, it is rare to find someone who [is able] to remember what it was to be in the ninth grade and be bullied, not that she was. She’s able to access those emotions and access what’s happening with kids today.”
Smith says that since the turn of the century, there’s been a surge in literature for children, first at the high school level, then trickling down to middle school readers. “YA [young adult literature] really took off; books started to be more current and contemporary and pushing boundaries,” he says. “You found this flourishing of different genres. There are more books [now] that deal with emotion as plot, like anxiety or how to deal with a first breakup. You see more of it, and publishers are less afraid of publishing it.”
In addition to an expansion of content, Smith says, there’s been an increase in the diversity of authors writing for children, which leads to plotlines and characters that more accurately reflect the country as a whole. “At the Library of Congress, we serve everyone in the nation,” Smith says. “There’s been this push for diversity, and publishers are really being held to account for all the different kinds of writers they promote. The options should be out there” for children to read stories about people who look like them.
Medina agrees that children should be empowered to choose the books that they want to read for pleasure, recalling how her mother let her purchase discounted books from a school book club as a child. “It felt so good to have a new book in my hands, to have had some agency, to have picked it myself,” she says.
She hopes the conversations she has with children about books create the same satisfaction she felt as a child, while spurring more discussion. “When you talk with a child about what you’re reading, you’ve told your child something about you; you’ve given them a window into who you are,” she says. “When they talk to you, they’ve given you a window about who they are right now. [With those interactions,] we’re keeping track of each other, respecting each other and listening to each other. That’s what family is.”
