October 2023 – Knitted Wit

It’s spooky season, friends, and what better books to read as the veil thins than those that have to do with zombies and ghosts? Our October HerStory recipient, Justina Ireland, does both of those genres very, very well, and we are so excited to dive into her books (and activism) this month!

Justina Ireland is a Black woman who writes YA and isn’t interested in backing down from a fight. Throughout her career, Ireland has been an active critic of the overwhelming whiteness in the YA publishing field, and the reticence of folks in that particular segment of the book world to engage in conversation about the lack of diversity in the field. She uses her Twitter account to call out disparities in the YA publishing world, to start conversations about representation, and to talk about books that uphold white supremacist ideals. Her twitter activism even inspired an author to revise her work to lessen its central white saviorism core (the jury is still out on whether that author was successful, and Ireland herself is more interested in the industry as a whole leaning into reform than individual works being reformed). She started a database of “sensitivity readers” that writers, particularly white writers, can hire to read their works from non-white perspectives, thus helping the industry become more inclusive. Ireland is also the founder of Writing in the Margins, an organization that provides mentorship to writers from historically marginalized groups, and she’s the former co-editor in chief of FIYAH Literary Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction, for which she won a World Fantasy Award.

She is one of the architects of a multimedia Star Wars project called The High Republic. If you know anything about fandoms like Star Wars, you know that there is a lot of white male gatekeeping going on, so Ireland and her cohorts have borne the brunt of a LOT of that baloney. And, she’s responded well; in one tweet, responding to a query about whether it’s smart or safe to include politics in your writing/work, she said “If you don’t like my politics and moral compass, you aren’t going to like my books, so let’s just go ahead and save everyone some time.” In other words, don’t buy my books if you don’t like what I have to say, because it’s going to be more of the same, and you won’t like it.

Our Dread Nation colorway, a delightfully zombie-riffic green splattered with red, is inspired by her best-known books, Dread Nation and Deathless Divide. Imagine the dead rising as zombies during the Civil War, and Black children are trained to be zombie hunters, charged with protecting privileged white people. It’s a new flavor of white supremacy, all wrapped up in a zombie series. And it’s so good! We hope you enjoy Ireland’s writing AND this colorway during spooky season!

Books by Justina Ireland: