by Deborah Dimmett
One successful program launched after Haiti’s 2013 earthquake was Li Li Li Read! Its founder, Michelle Karshan, noticed that children whose families and homes had been uprooted by the earthquake were in great need of something that would brighten their day and take their mind off of the deplorable conditions in which they lived. Thus, in 2010 she created the program Li Li Li Read! for internally displaced children living in camps throughout Port-au-Prince and surrounding municipalities. Continue reading
In the first two posts of this series, I briefly discussed the history of picture books with LGBT characters and provided a general overview of the representations of the LGBT characters. This week I look at books where the characters are not explicitly named or depicted as LGBT, but where they are portrayed in ways that imply an LGBT sexual orientation.
The collection of children’s picture books with LGBT characters began growing steadily when Heather Has Two Mommies (Newman, 1989) was published 25 years ago. With a few books added most years, there are currently over 100 books in this collection, which fall into five general categories: books with lesbian characters, books with gay characters, books with transgender characters, books with implied LGBT characters, and nonfiction books about families which include a gay or lesbian parent. In this categorization system, I have separated the books with lesbian, gay, and transgender characters 
The first book that had an impact on the discussion of diaspora was Diamond Boy by Michael Williams. This story is about Patson Moyo a 15-year-old living with his father, stepmother and sister in Zimbabwe. His father is a schoolteacher who believes in his profession with all his heart but the stepmother wants more financially. The search for ‘more’ takes them to the Marange diamond fields; a portion of which belongs to the stepmother’s brother.Here the family divides as the stepmother opts to stay with her brother’s large family of two wives and children while Patson and his father and sister are driven to live in tobacco sheds while they search for their fortune in a ‘girazi’ (a priceless stone) that would change their lives forever. 
