Flying Lessons & Other Stories

In 2014, Ellen Oh, author of young adult and middle grade books, spearheaded a campaign centered around the need for more diverse representation in children’s books. What started as a social media movement in response to an all-white, all-male panel of authors at a publishing convention, eventually grew into the nonprofit organization known as We Need Diverse Books (WNDB). As founder and CEO, Oh teamed up with other authors and publishing professionals to tackle these inequities.

WNDB defines diverse experiences as “including (but not limited to) LGBTQIA, Native, people of color, gender diversity, people with disabilities, and ethnic, cultural, and religious minorities,” noting that its definition of disability broadly includes not just physical and mental disabilities, but mental illness and addiction as well, often created by social barriers (“About Us.” We Need Diverse Books, 2023). With this definition in mind, their aim is to promote literacy and empathy while diversifying the publishing industry and reducing bias. Ultimately, WNDB strives for more children to see themselves reflected in the texts they read.

To tackle these goals, Oh and her team created a wide range of programs supporting authors, illustrators, publishers, and classrooms across the United States. As a result, WNDB has helped change the landscape of children’s and youth publishing, boosting the number of diverse texts, some of which have won prestigious awards like the Newbery Medal. Additionally, it has helped make the publishing industry more diverse, donated hundreds of thousands of books to libraries nationwide, fought book bans because they often target diverse texts, and provided teacher access to classroom resources on race, equity, antiracism, and inclusion.

Flying Lessons and Other Stories was published by Oh and We Need Diverse Books in 2017 specifically to amplify the voices of a wide range of middle grade authors, helping students see themselves reflected in the literature they read. In an interview about the collection, Oh states, “Diversity is not only important for the underrepresented, it’s really important for everyone. We all need to be exposed to other races and other cultures in positive ways, not in stereotypical ones.” Oh goes on to emphasize that “having good representation helps people learn tolerance and acceptance of differences” (Salazar, Wesley. “On Diversity in Kids’ Lit: A Chat with Ellen Oh About Flying Lessons and Other Stories.” Brightly, 2023). The stories in this collection all feature protagonists from a range of backgrounds and experiences related to race, gender, class, culture, and ability. In some, the characters grapple with the obstacles resulting from an intersection of multiple identities. The narrator in Matt de la Peña’s opening story pursues his dreams of playing basketball while contending with the realities of racial profiling. Lingsi, a young girl in Grace Lin’s “The Difficult Path,” set in Imperial China, faces obstacles related to both gender and class. In “Choctaw Bigfoot, Midnight in the Mountains” by Tim Tingle, the narrator celebrates the Choctaw storytelling tradition, while Treetop, the white narrator in Jacqueline Woodson’s “Main Street,” begins to understand the biases and challenges her Black friend, Celeste, faces daily. Chris, the protagonist in Walter Dean Myers’s “Sometimes a Dream Needs a Push,” joins a wheelchair basketball team and propels his father to see that his dreams are attainable. Yet, within this diversity lie the common themes of Love and Support in Unexpected and Unconventional Forms, Embracing Identity in the Face of Societal Expectations, and The Power of Stories and Words. No matter the identity of these characters, they are striving for something similar: a sense of belonging.

Since 2017, WNDB has published three more anthologies spotlighting diverse voices and experiences. Another middle grade collection, The Hero Next Door was published in 2019. Two young adult anthologies of stories, Fresh Ink and A Universe of Wishes, were printed in 2018 and 2022, respectively.