Discover new authors and broaden your reading horizons by participating in this April’s Reading Without Walls event!
What is the Reading Without Walls challenge?
Throughout the month of April, you can participate in the Reading Without Walls challenge by doing one (or all!) of the following:
- Read a book about a character who doesn’t look or live like you.
- Read a book about a topic you don’t know much about.
- Read a book in a format that you don’t normally read for fun.
How did Reading Without Walls get started?
In 2016, Gene Luen Yang, author of American Born Chinese and Boxers & Saints, became the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. During that year, he created the Reading Without Walls platform as a way for readers worldwide to explore books about characters who looked or lived differently than them, to read about topics they hadn’t discovered and delve into formats they’d never tried.
Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group teamed up with Gene Luen Yang to take his project from an informal initiative to a robust annual celebration set in April with materials, resources and book and author features.
Why is it important to Read Without Walls?
Whether you’re a voracious reader or feel an overwhelming sense of guilt at your ever-growing TBR pile (or perhaps, like me, you’re both!), it can be easy to get stuck in a reading rut. You know the feeling — you go to the bookstore or browse your favorite online retailer and only look for authors and genres that you always gravitate towards — kind of like going to your favorite restaurant, glancing at the menu and then ordering the same thing you always order.
There’s nothing wrong with this, of course — especially if your experience is one that rarely gets written about and therefore has likely only recently started being published with any sort of regularity. Literature, after all, should be a mirror — a way for us to see ourselves represented in the world and written about.
However, literature is also a window as well as a mirror. It gives us the ability to inhabit different lives and experiences, learn about different topics and explore different worlds without ever leaving the comfort of our own cozy reading spaces. And in doing so, helps us to recognize the validity of people who don’t look or act like us, appreciate spaces we’re unfamiliar with, and beat back fear and paranoia that are more often than not caused simply by a lack of knowledge or experience.
Participating in a program like Reading Without Walls allows us to push ourselves towards greater inclusivity, while also showing authors that their voices matter and signaling publishers that diverse voices are important and necessary to highlight.
How will we be celebrating Reading Without Walls here on Hypable?
Each week, we’ll have features from different diverse authors as a way to both highlight their own work and promote the mission of Reading Without Walls. We’ll also be curating book lists with #ownvoices authors, unique topics and different formats! Check back each week so that you can start building your own Reading Without Walls TBR list!
Reading Without Walls is going on now and will run through the entire month of April! To learn more about the challenge or to find resources you can use in your classroom, visit the official Reading Without Walls website!