Why we published "first person fiction".

40 PERCENT IN NEW YORK BORN ABROAD--The New York Times, July 24, 2000

IMMIGRANTS MAKE UP 11 PERCENT OF THE POPULATION OF THE U.S.--U.S. Census, August 6, 2001

NEARLY ONE IN FIVE AMERICANS DOES NOT SPEAK ENGLISH AT HOME.--U.S. Census. August 6, 2001

Almost every day, newspapers across the country are full of headlines and figures like these. According to census data published in The New York Times, "About 44 percent of the nation's 30.5 million foreign-born residents, or 13.3 million people, arrived here in the 1990's." The face of America has changed significantly in the last decade, and while the adult market is already home to many successful books on the contemporary immigrant experience, it has been largely ignored in the middle-grade and young adult markets. Jean Feiwel, Publisher of Scholastic Inc., wanted to address this ever-growing need. With First Person Fiction, a line of novels launched by Orchard Books in Fall 2002, we're taking a step toward doing just that. The three books published so far are Behind the Mountains by Gathering the Dew by Minfong Ho. In coming seasons, more are on the way.

First Person Fiction is dedicated to the literature of a new population in America. Through the eyes of young immigrants to modern America, the books explore what defines and unites us as Americans, and will hopefully serve to help readers identify with their peers in spite of their diverse cultural backgrounds. Today's immigrants face very different challenges from those of the past. There is no longer a nave illusion of the golden land of America, nor is there the same desire to completely abandon one's culture in order to blend in. For most contemporary immigrants, assimilation is a delicate balance of maintaining the culture of the world left behind, and marrying it with the new world in America. While every immigrant experience is individual and unique, the First Person books are united by the steps the characters take towards assimilation as well as by the daily sacrifices they make in order to adjust to an American awareness.

With First Person Fiction, our aim is to reach a young reader whose experiences and needs have been ignored until quite recently. The authors we've chosen are all too familiar with the experience of being displaced from their native country by choice by force, or as a result of war or exile. Coming to America, for some, is matter of choice; for others, it so a necessity. Becoming an American is a struggle for definition, for individual, for identity. The authors, and the characters in their books, live a "hyphenated reality"--Haitian-American, Puerto Rican-American, Korean-American. In Meri Nana-Ama Danquah's introduction to Becoming American: Personal Essays by First Generation Immigrant Women, she writes:

   "Throughout my youth, I had seen and
   read books about immigration. None
   of them contained any information
   that even remotely seemed to relate to
   me. There wasn't anybody on the Mayflower
   who looked like me. Or on Ellis
   Island. And if there was, I would have
   never known it from the photographs
   or the text in the books I read.... it was
   hard for me to believe that there were
   no reflections of me, of my experiences,
   in any of those books. Where
   were the accounts of immigrant experiences
   through the eyes of a black
   African-born woman?"

The recent recognition for children's books by and about immigrants, like A Step from Heaven by An Na, winner of the 2001 Michael L. Printz award, and Parrot in the Oven: Mi Vida by Victor Martinez, winner of the 1996 National Book Award for Young People's Fiction, makes it quite evident that there is a market hungry for books about immigrants. Each First Person book will be read for accuracy and authenticity by another person of the culture, in most case a professor or another writer. The readers make up the First Person Editorial Board, which will increase with the publication of each title.

In order to publish well and successfully, we knew that it was important to find authors with a voice that young readers would understand and trust--authors who've been through the same things as our readers. The books in First Person Fiction are written by immigrants, or the children of immigrants, and what a gifted and varied group we have found.

Edwidge Danticat, the author of Behind..., is a best-selling and critically acclaimed author of adult books. Ms. Danticat was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in 1969. Her parents immigrated to New York when she was a small child, while she and her brother remain in Haiti, where they were raised by an aunt and uncle. At the age of twelve she moved to Brooklyn to be with her persons.

Danticat began writing as a teenager. Her first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, was chosen as an Oprah Book Club Selection. The following year she was nominated for the National Book Award for her story collection Krik? Krak! When we approached Edwidge, we had no idea that she was a huge fan of our Dear America books, and gave them as gifts to many girls she knew. She was happy to take on the challenge of writing for a younger audience, and to write a book inspired by her own experience. "My summers in the Haitian mountains were what I missed most when I moved to Brooklyn in 1981," say Danticat. "In New York, I would look for similarities between the skyscrapers and the mountains, which had loomed over my childhood summers, and for a likeness between the winter snow and the late summer hailstorm that had seemed so magical up in the mountains... Eventually, I adjusted to life in New York, concentrating on my junior high school studies in an English as a Second Language program ... However, I would never stop missing the Haitian mountain villages, which I have revisited many times as an adult." In behind ..., which School Library Journal has called a "gem of a book," Danticat chose to explore what it might be like to move to the United States from Haiti in more recent times, especially after the turbulent period of the 2000 Haitian president elections.

Flight ... is closely based on Ana Veciana-Suarez's own story of leaving Cuba during the Freedom Flights of the 1960s, when her family was exiled from their middle-class life, along with thousands of other Cubans. Veciana-Suarez was born in Havana in 1956. After leaving Cuba with her family at age six, she spent about a year in Spain and then moved to Grapeland Heights, the Miami neighborhood where she lived until the family moved to La Paz, Bolivia when she was 11. As a teenager, she returned with her family to Grapeland Heights, the setting for her first novel, The Chin Kiss King. Library Journal said of her book Birthday Parties in Heaven, "Veciana-Suarez has managed to retain an ability to view her culture with the crisp impressions perceived only by the newcomer or the very young." In Flight..., Yara Garcia leaves Cuba for Miami on a Freedom Flight, just as Veciana-Suarez did as a child:

... from the window seat beside Papi, I was able to see the green and brown of the island and then the deep blue of the ocean. Papi looked out, too, and he sighed. He said that now we were officially exiles. I asked what that meant exactly, and he replied that we belonged nowhere, not in Cuba and not in the United States. Maybe exile means staying forever in an airplane, suspended over an ocean between two countries, just as we are now.

Minfong Ho, the author of Gathering..., was born in Burma and grew up in Thailand. In 1980, during the massive influx of refugees from Cambodia, Ms. Ho became a relief worker in the refugee camps on the Thai-Cambodian border, where she helped set up a feeding program for malnourished children. The child of Chinese immigrants, Ms. Ho was part of family that was forced to move several times because of political turmoil. This experience enabled her to empathize deeply with the Khmer refugees when she wrote Gathering.... After moving to the United States, Ms. Ho "came to know firsthand what it felt like to be cut off from one's roots, and to have to try and adapt as a transplant on foreign soil. ... I understood what it was like to try hard to adjust to new surrounding while at the same time trying to retain old loyalties and memories. I struggled with the same time trying to retain old loyalties and memories. I struggled with the same question immigrants often do: when changing oneself becomes a means of survival, why does it so all immigrants, I desperately wanted there to be a bridge between my new life in America, and my old life at home."

Future books in the First Person Fiction line include, in Fall 2003, Finding My Hat, John Son's semi-autobiographical story of a Korean family's struggle to find their place in America. In Spring 2004, Pushcart-Prize winning author Judith Ortiz Cofer will contribute 100 Scenes from Mt Life, a novel about a Puerto Rican girl from the barrio who longs to be a poet. We're also planning future books about immigrants from Ghana, Afghanistan, and Eastern Europe.

Upon receiving the galleys for Behind ... and Flight ..., Sandie Farrell of the Free Library in Philadelphia remarked that she was "absolutely thrilled to see the faces and stories of my teenagers looking back at me from the covers." Ruth Nathan, a teacher, said, "I'm encouraged by this work, especially for those struggling readers who will understand these books, as well as for those of us who need to get inside these students' heads." As the list of the First Person Fiction books continues to expand, we hope to reach the growing number of readers who have missed seeing themselves in the books they pull from the shelves of their classrooms, libraries, and bookstores.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Behind the Mountains, by Edwidge Danticat. Published October 2001. Ages 11-15. 176 pages. 0-439-37299-2. $16.95.

Flight to Freedom, by Ana Veciana-Suarez. Published October 2001. Ages 11-15. 176 pages. 0-439-38199-1. $16.95.

Gathering the Dew, by Minfong Ho. Published March 2003. Ages 11-15. 208 pages. 0-4439-38197-5. $16.95.

All books published by Orchard Books, an imprint of Scholastic.