Alt Kid Lit

Contributions by Kris Alexander, Amanda K. Allen, Brianna Anderson, Catherine Burwell, Katharine Capshaw, Negin Dahya, Gabriel Duckels, Paige Gray, Gabrielle Atwood Halko, Natasha Hurley, Kenneth B. Kidd, Erica Law-Montes, Derritt Mason, Brandon Murakami, Tehmina Pirzada, Cristina Rhodes, Cristina Rivera, Jakob Rosendal, TreaAndrea M. Russworm, Vivek Shraya, Victoria Ford Smith, Joshua Whitehead, and Shuyin Yu How do we think about childrens and young adult literature? Childrens literature is often defined through audience, so what happens when children are drawn to and claim genres not built expressly "for" them? To what extent do canonical formations tend to overwrite or obscure less visible efforts to create and promote material for the young? These are the driving questions of Alt Kid Lit: What Children's Literature Might Be. Contributors to the volume offer theoretical meditations on the category of childrens and young adult literature as well as case studies of materials that complicate our understanding of such. Chapters attend to a diverse array of subjects including the "non-places" of childrens literature; child mediums; Black theater for children; childrens interpretive drawings; fanfiction; Latinx, Indigenous, and silkpunk speculative fiction; environmental zines; shnen anime; Jim Henson's The Dark Crystal; South Asian television; and "emergency childrens literature." The book also features interviews with two experimental writers about genre and alt-publishing and a roundtable conversation on video games and childrens digital engagements. Building on diverse approaches including queer theory and postcolonial studies, Alt Kid Lit shines light on materials, methodologies, and epistemologies that are sometimes underacknowledged in the field of childrens and young adult literature studies.