Monday, January 30, 2012

The 2012 POC Reading Challenge

Hi everyone!

I know we've kind of been quiet over the last couple of months about this challenge and whether it would continue or not. The three of us have seen this year become quite busy, and we questioned whether we would be able to continue hosting this challenge or not.

In order to keep the challenge alive, we've decided to scale it back a bit. We will no longer be giving away book prizes every month. We might give away a book every so often, but it won't be a regular thing here.

We'll continue to have book link-ups every month, and encourage everyone to visit each other's reviews of the books they've read that feature a person of color as a main character or that have been written by authors of color.

I (Katy) am going to try to continue doing what I've been doing here from the beginning--posting the link-ups and visiting reviews when I can. If you have any questions, please email or tweet me (my contact information is in the sidebar).

If anyone is interested in contributing a guest post here, I would absolutely welcome it! Guest posts should be related to the reading challenge--for example, reviews of books that qualify for the POC Reading Challenge and posts about issues that challenge participants would be interested in (cover whitewashing, challenges faced by authors of color, etc).

Here are the challenge details:
Any book (by any author) with a main character that is a person of color qualifies for this reading challenge, as well as any book written by an author of color. The goal is to encourage readers have a more diverse reading experience and to support diversity in the publishing industry by reading and reviewing books by or about persons of color.
Choose how many POC books you would like to read in 2012:
Level 1: Read 1-3 POC books
Level 2. Read 4-6 POC books
Level 3. Read 7-9 POC books
Level 4. Read 10-15 POC books
Level 5. Read 16-25 POC books
So if you'd like to participate in the 2012 POC Reading Challenge, please do sign up, and if you have a blog please spread the word by grabbing the button from the sidebar and posting about your participation. I'll start a new link-up for reviews on February 1.