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$5k Match – Social Justice Children’s Book Fair

Hey fam, my organization the Social Justice Children’s Book Fair got a $5k grant and will be fundraising over the next 30 days to match it dollar for dollar. If you’re unfamiliar with the fair I invite you to check out….

Our Website: Site, 2025 fair, 2025 Award winners,

Social Media: Instagram, Facebook, or YouTube

Press: Oaklandside article, NBC News clip, Hard Knock (KPFA) Radio Interview 

Here are some photos taken by photographer Mark Rea from the 2025 fair. Wanna see more? Check out this Facebook page or our website.

Short Mission: Bruh, make a kids book fair that champions social justice kid lit. Also, champion Bipoc, Queer, Immigrant, and Social Justice creators and kid focused orgs.

Longer Mission & Vision: Our mission is to promote social justice through the power of children’s books. We support independent children’s book creators to conceive, develop, distribute, and champion social justice-themed children’s books. We do this through our signature event, the annual Social Justice Children’s Book Fair, and other ongoing projects and initiatives.

We envision a world where children’s book creators have the ability to conceive, develop, distribute, and champion a diversity of social justice-centered stories that need to be told as they look to reach all children, families, teachers, librarians, and book lovers.

My Why: I believe there are some amazing stories about culture, class, race, gender, identity, politics, history, etc that need to be shared with a wider audience and I get to help facilitate that as one of many organizers of this fair. I believe in representation, being able to see yourself in literature early, and I believe in literacy for liberation and fun.

Accomplishments:

  • 2 years of co-curating Youth Lit Day for Bay Area Book Festival
  • Over 2k attendees
  • Thousands of kids books donated to Bay Area students
  • 1700 Social Media followers
  • 400+ Stories
  • 100+ Creators, authors, illustrators, publishers, etc
  • 30+ Organizations
  • 10 years this year!
  • 8 Performers

7 years all volunteer, 2 years w/ small funding. Imagine what we could do with more. Wanna help us continue to grow this?

DONATE HERE

July 15, 2026
in Educational Resources, Events
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I’m on “Short Cuts” Podcast- Bay Area Book Festival

Watch: Hey fam, I’m on the Bay Area Book Festival podcast “Short Cuts” w/ Dora La Flora talking about this year’s festival happening in late May, tune in to learn more. And come to the Bay Area Book Festival happening May30-31st in Berkeley California. You can find out more about the Youth Lit Specific day here and get the broader schedule here.

Why go?

  • If you’re a book lover or someone who wants to get your kids reading or get something new to read, there is such a wide array of books there from kid lit to romance, poetry, non fiction, etc. Its there.
  • If you’re someone who works in this field or you’d like to work in it, this is s great opportunity to meet folks ion your field at your level and folks who’ve been doing this for a long time.
  • Lastly, support community led events as opposed to corporations.

Dig this? Check out the Bay Area Book Festival’s YouTube page

April 28, 2026
in Events, Press & Interviews
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9th Annual Social Justice Children’s Book Fair

Fam, it’s that time of year. The 9th annual Social Justice Children’s Book Fair is upon us. This fair celebrates Bipoc, Queer, Immigrant, and Social Justice minded kid lit creators, literacy organizations, and the Bay kid lit community. We got over 50 creators, panels, performances, story time, and activities!!

Shout out The Conscious Kid and the Bay Area Book Festival for sponsoring this event!

Saturday Dec 6th, 11am-3pm in Oakland California

Its free and open to the public. If you’d like to attend, rsvp here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/2025-social-justice-childrens-book-fair-tickets-1967246325717?aff=oddtdtcreator

Wanna help us get press? Send them the press release. Wanna see some photos from past fairs? Check out these albums of photos taken by Janine Macbeth, Mark Rea, Alejandra Domenzain, and more. Follow us on Instagram. Wanna see some press? Peep this from Ronnie’s List and Oaklandside.

November 20, 2025
in Creative Resources, Educational Resources, Events
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Fairyland Children’s Book Fest-9/20/25

Hey fam, I will be at this years “Fairyland Children’s Book Fair” supporting the Youth Writers Workshop. This past Spring I had the distinct pleasure of working with artist Michaela Ellis to design and plan an awesome series of workshops incorporating team building, games, writing, and drawing exercises, and time to work on their own stories. Some of those stories have been completed and will be published in a journal which you can get that supports young writers. At this years Fest Whitley Gilbert and I will be introducing some of these young creators to you and tabling with them where you can come get your book signed by them 🙂

Ok, come check us out and meet one or two of the 30+ authors who will be there such as Nidhi Chanani, Natasha Triplett, Laura Atkins, Bo Lu, Eugenia Yoh, Malick Sickstein, Charlotte Cheng, Angela Dalton, and more.

September 20th , 10am-4pm

MORE INFO HERE

Dig this? Check out their Instagram

September 8, 2025
in Creative Resources, Events
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Bay Area Book Fest- Panels

Yo, this weekend at the Bay Area Book Festival I will be on two panel discussions and representing for the Social Justice Children’s Book Fair who helped to plan the “Family Day” this year. This event has been happening for 10 years! I’ve been a vendor there, a panelist, and attendee. There’s a book market place, a family day curating the best in kid lit, panel discussions, workshops, your favorite authors, and there are a bunch of activities.

Wanna go? check out the organization and the schedule here. Wanna see the panels I’ll be on? Scroll down.

This one is about the themes of activism in stories and the activism happening in real life around stories, book bans, diverse books, history, and more. Here’s more info about this panel.

Here’s the second panel I’ll be on with Zetta Elliott, Matthew Smith, Maya Gonzalez, and Laura Atkins. We’ll be talking about alternative methods to the traditional publishing worlds. More info about this panel here.

Dig this? Check out some press from the Social Justice Children’s Book Fair.

May 29, 2025
in Events
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Video – Social Justice Children’s Book Fair

link to watch

Hey fam, this is my video explainer/pitch about the Social Justice Children’s Book Fair, what it does, and why its existence is so important right now. We’re in a $5k fundraising drive to match a $5k grant that was given to us. Since 2017 we’ve brought the funk here in the Bay Area re: Bipoc, Queer, Immigrant, and Social Justice minded kid lit creators. We have been volunteer based until last year and we’re trying to make our work more sustainable.

Watch the video, share it, and….

CONTRIBUTE TO THE FUNDRAISER

Dig this? Check out this time Oaklandside did a write up about our fair

Group photo from 2023 by Mark Rea

May 23, 2025
in Events
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Black Child Book Fair- Oakland Dec 15th, 12-5pm

Hey fam, I connected with the homie Darryl Harvey about this upcoming event in Oakland at the historic AAMLO library on 14th St. I hope to see you there. Darryl is from Chicago and started these events before th pandemic in the midwest first, then slowly building to other cities such as Cincinatti, Charlotte, Minneapolis and more. Not many folks in the Bay know this one since its brand new but I hope to connect our local Black author eco system to it. And I hope to make it out to the mother city-Chicago.

WEBSITE FOR MORE INFO

You can check out some photos and video from some of their previous event here.

February 4, 2025
in General
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7th Annual Social Justice Children’s Bk Holiday Fair

Man, I was so busy sharing about this event and planning and prepping that I forgot to psot about it on my own damn blog. Anyways, for those who came it was beautiful and hectic. For the first time we partnered with Emerson Elementary in Oakland.

Here is the livestream of interviews and performances from that day:

Interviews w/ Emerson PTA, Local authors, activists, and musicians

Here is the Facebook invite from this year

And here is the books new Instagram account. Please follow us!

Link to our IG

Ok, if you were not there but want to support the authors/organizations/musicians who tabled please go to our website.

Dig this? Check out some photos for the fair last year.

December 11, 2023
in General
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Photos from 6th Social Justice Children’s Book Holiday Fair

 

Organizers of the fair: Me, Laura Atkins, Alejandra Domezain, Janine Macbeth, Peter Limata, Lydia Yamaguchi, Innosanto Nagara-not pictured) photo by Mark Rea
photo by Mark Rea
Breanna McDaniels w/ Hayley Diep , photo by Mark Rea
Me! photo by Mark Rea

If you missed the book fair but still want to buy books you can still purchase books from some of the vendors here
All the Fairs authors/illustrators , photo by Mark Rea

Screenshot from livestream Mr Limata w/ James Shields
photo by Janine Macbeth (Aida Salazar w/ Aya de Leon)
photo by Janine Macbeth (Mr Limata w/ Ko Kim)
For all those who missed the “6th annual “Social Justice Children’s Book Holiday Fair” here are a few photos from the event. If you’d like to see more please go here.
Digging this? Check out the year we did it online during the pandemic or the Livestream Interviews W/ Mr Limata this year

December 19, 2022
in Events, General
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Video: Interviews @ the “Social Justice Children’s Book Holiday Fair”

 

This is some video footage featuring interviews from book creators, organizations, the organizers of the event, and the owner of Teance. Can we give it up for Peter Limata and Lydia Yamaguchi though? They just bring SO MUCH vibrancy, love, and care to what they capture and who they spoke to at the event!  Please watch and enjoy. If you did not get a chance to attend the fair in person you can still get books from the creators who were there and many others using our website 
Here is more interviews Peter did leading up to the fair that morning. In this he speaks to Jill Guerra (We are Yoga/Somos Yoga), Christina Newhard of Sari Sari Books (KaliPay, Melo the Umang Boy), Breanna McDaniels (Hands Up), and John Casselberry (Konscious Kids).
Dig this? Check out the virtual 2020 Social Justice Children’s Book Fair

December 12, 2022
in General
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