A Conversation with Namrata Tripathi and Randy Ribay - Season 4, Episode 5

In this episode, Julia speaks with Namrata Tripathi Vice President and Publisher of Kokila books, an imprint that specializes in centering  stories from the margins, and Randy Ribay, educator and author of An Infinite Number of Parallel Universes, After the Shot Drops, and the highly acclaimed Patron Saints of Nothing. Listen as the three of them talk all things books, publishing, education and the intersections between them.

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Creators and Guests

Guest

Julia Torres

Julia E. Torres is a veteran language arts teacher and librarian in Denver Public schools.

Guest

Namrata Tripathi

Guest

Randy Ribay

What is The Book Love Foundation Podcast?

Celebrate the joy of reading with the Book Love Foundation podcast. This is a show filled with information and inspiration from teachers and leaders across grade levels, states, and school systems. We interviewed authors and educators for the first five years and now turn our attention to leaders in public, private, and charter schools. Find out more at booklovefoundation.org or join our book-love-community.mn.co of 2500 educators from 28 countries. We sustain joy together, one kid and one book at a time.

Julia Torres 00:07
Hi, I'm Julia Torres, and this is another episode of the Book Love Foundation podcast. I am a Denver Public Schools librarian and language arts teacher, and today I have some very fun guests for you. I'm going to let them introduce themselves, but I'm super excited to talk about all things, so get ready for a wonderful episode.

Namrata Tripathi 00:28
So I'm Namrata Tripathi. I'm the publisher and founder of an imprint called Kokila, which is at Penguin young readers. And I'm also Randy's editor on the book Patron Saints of Nothing.

Randy Ribay 00:40
And I am Randy Ribay, a high school English teacher in the Bay Area now, and the author of Patron Saints of Nothing, as well as After the Shot Drops and an Infinite Number of Parallel Universes.

Julia Torres 00:52
I find myself here with two very important people within the imprint Kokila books, which I love. Team Kokila is a hashtag. It is a movement. It is phenomenal. One of the things that I wanted to do is for readers and listeners, because we've got some teachers, but we've got some pre service teachers as well. Lots of people in the book club, in the summer book club this year, are reading Randy's book right now this week, actually, they're reading patron Patron Saints of Nothing, to be able to talk about it, to be able to teach it, and to be able to use it as book club books. So one of the things that I want you to do is travel back in time and think about what was school like for you, as readers, as learners. What did you like about it? What was challenging, Randy, would you like to go first?

Randy Ribay 01:46
Sure it's a blurry time of my life. The older I get, the blurrier it gets. But you know, I remember going through school and not being terribly excited about it. I did pretty well, I think because I had, like, a pretty good memory, that's kind of leaving me now. But I was good at I was good at doing school, but I don't think I ever was, like, felt particularly inspired or motivated by it. You know, when I think back on, like, the books that I loved reading when I was a kid, like, none of them were books that we read in school. You know, it was stuff like Chronicles of Narnia and Goosebumps, and then like later on, like Stephen King and stuff like that, all stuff that, you know, I just kind of found on my own and read it outside of classes. And as I got older, I think that kind of solidified a little bit more, kind of the, you know, school became a lot more about getting the good grades, kind of doing what you need to do to, like, get into a good college, at least that's the experience my family and so just a lot of pressure, a lot of lot of doing things because I was told to do them or expected to do them, not necessarily because, you know, I was interested or connected with anything we were reading in school. I honestly couldn't tell you the name of like, any book I read in school until the 11th grade, when I was in the the IB or the International Baccalaureate program, and that was the year that we read. It was essentially like world literature. So it was like Things Fall Apart and Woman Warrior Ceremony, all these books that kind of, I guess, started to wake me up a little bit more to the world outside of the dead white guy canon.

Julia Torres 03:31
I'm very much like you. I think my favorite books were Pierce Anthony I read BC Andrews. I was talking about that with me Elizabeth Thomas earlier this month. And then I really liked Octavia Butler, but a lot of people that I went to school with in that time just didn't know about her. I was lucky, because my mom was a librarian, so she could, you know, introduce me to some books that weren't really they weren't going to be taught. She was a big sci fi fan. She still is, so I read a lot of science fiction, and that's something that I think perhaps is a commonality with most of the educators of color that I know we had to find our reading lives outside of school. What about you Namrata?

Namrata Tripathi 04:09
Yeah, I mean, I think it's there's some overlap there in terms of, you know, finding, finding my life as a reader a little bit outside of school. I think, like, the library was actually pretty clutch in that. I don't really remember the books that I was assigned in class, but I do remember checking out books in the library and really loving them. And like, you know, when I was very little, I mean, I think I was, you know, I was a pretty, like, devoted little student. We all were, you know. And I think some of it is like, I was self motivated and liked school, you know, for the most part. And also have that thing of like, you know, I'm a good Indian girl, and I, like, would deliver and achieve as was sort of expected of me. And so it's a mix of things where it's sort of like, how much of it really comes. Within and how much of it is like centuries of sort of conditioning where you feel like you have to perform a certain way. So I'm not sure I'll probably be unpacking that for the rest of my life, but, but with real but with reading, I mean, I think I always enjoyed it, and I think it was like a mix of like stuff we were in school, which a lot of times I went to international or American schools because of the way I grew up. My folks were diplomats in Boeing from India, and moved like, every three years to some other to another country, but often went to, like I would always went to English medium school. So, you know, we lived in Canada. It was public school, and so you it was like, you know, feel like the books you read in Canada, you mix of like stuff you learn from like, from American culture, some some sort of Canadian stuff, and a little bit of British stuff being Indian, there was definitely some British influence and like, and none of those books I really saw myself. And then it was like outside where my mom would maybe read me, like myths from Indian, like Indian myths and religious texts like, you know, my and Mahabharat stories from those sort of epics, where you start to see your own culture in a way that we were the heroes, you know, so I didn't really grow up with that so much. But as a kid, like, I love like, you know, we're all doll because that's what I was read to, you know, as like a elementary school kid. And when I think I was in grade four or something was, you know, a little bit before he had died, I got my entire class to write him a letter, like a fan letter from Pakistan. It was kids in Pakistan writing to him, he or his people wrote back. It was incredible. And wrote this, like very funny poem. But how we were lucky that the teacher let let us write to him, because when he was our age, the teachers were so strict that, you know, whenever the boys misbehaved, the teacher would pull the ear off the boys. And so there was a classroom full of one eared boys, and before, and I was like, that was amazing. So I know that was my daughter in the back. Yeah. What did she say? She said, That's cray. So you know it was I loved, I loved to read, I think, but I didn't, I didn't know that I saw myself as a reader necessarily, you know, it was, it was just sort of where you went to, sometimes to escape and sometimes to find yourself, and sometimes it was assigned, you know, anything from comics to what we were reading a school I would Pretty much happily consume. I was pretty omnivorous about it.

Julia Torres 07:23
And my students, you know, what's so interesting about them is that they're reading all the time. And maybe Randy, you can agree that our students are reading all the time. I don't know what your school is like, but at my school, a lot of kids just don't think they don't self identify as readers, even though they're reading all the time. If you ask them, and I did ask about 300 of them whether they would self identify as readers, and over 78% said no. So that is something that is work to change, but you two make it easier because the students read books not only in which they see themselves, but just non white people. I think, because that's our school environment, we have very few white people in our school environment. It's 89% students of color. And then the staff, which this is very common, is mostly white teachers. So But overall, you know, 2000 people in the building, a little over 2000 people in the building. Most people are people of color. They're brown or black. So how do you think that today's students experience the reading journey in your class, in the schools that you visited, according to people that you know, children that you might know? What do you think about that?

Namrata Tripathi 08:44
Go for it, Randy, I feel like a teacher when I call on you, also, like Randy, I'm really interested in hearing your perspective as a teacher and then also as a writer.

Randy Ribay 08:49
Yeah, you know, it is really interesting, because you know you're talking about students not thinking of themselves as readers. You know, with how much they use social media, they're probably reading more than any other generation before them, right? And and also, like, this is a small thing, but I find also, like, the younger generation is much more comfortable with subtitles, also when they watch movies and videos all the time.

Julia Torres 09:15
Yeah, I insist on having them.

Randy Ribay 09:18
And so I think, you know, at the at the level of just like physically reading, they're doing it more than ever before. But I think part of, part of what I see as the as the struggle, is just kind of the matter of attention, right? Where is that attention going? Because as much as I do engage with social media and kind of see the advantages of it, or other forms of media. I do think that there's a depth in, you know, narrative prose, that you don't quite get in other mediums. You know, I love movies. I love TV shows. I think maybe TV shows are moving closer to that, with kind of moving more towards, like, storytelling arcs. And I could talk about TV for a really long time, because. I watch a lot of TV shows, but I think, you know, in terms of just pure language of pros and the ability to put yourself into somebody else's mind, almost directly, or as directly as we can get, you know, without physically being the other person. You know, there's still something magical and something valuable in that, and as a teacher, part of what I see my role is just kind of like helping kids understand that and helping kids discover that. And you know, some get it inherently. Some some get it because they've been taught that by their families. They've been exposed to different books, but then a vast majority of kids have only read really kind of what was assigned to them to read in school. And you know, speaking as a teacher, a lot of the lot of times those texts aren't that great. They're not speaking to the kids today, right? They're speaking to the kids primarily, like the white kids of 5060, years ago. And they just get recycled on these, on this curricula, over and over again. And so I think part of how I get kids to kind of realize the power that's inherent in language and reading, you know, in terms of like longer form books or short stories or poetry, is to expose them to texts that are powerful, that can speak for themselves, and that they they might be able to connect with in a way that they might not be able to connect this easily with in terms of other texts. I don't know if that makes any sense.

Julia Torres 11:28
But it does. It does. I have a question, though, that isn't one of the questions that I sent you in advance. What is the your school like? What's the what are the demographics? Where is it? What's if you feel comfortable, you know, just I think text, it'd be important to know if yours is similar to mine or different, because I know that in very restrictive environments, we don't have as much choice about the books that students read, and in the least restrictive environments, there are a lot of options for what students can read. So I'm curious about your teaching journey there.

Randy Ribay 11:59
So when I was teaching in public school, and it was a lot more restrictive in terms of, here's the textbook that we use for this grade level, I basically just didn't do that. Kind of just did my own thing. You know, I've got books by like, Walter Dean, Myers and Sharon flake and stuff. Got class sets kind of through a combination of, like, Donors Choose, going through used bookstores, you know, buying stuff online for discounted prices, and kind of curated my own classroom library in that way, with class sets that I could use, as well as, like, small group reading, you know, like lit circles kind of approach, as well as, just like, compiling all, like, A ton of books that I could on my own, to have my own classroom library, to have, like an independent reading kind of element, so that kids were also reading kind of on top of that, and we were also, like reading a book together as a class, in which case, like, sometimes one of those class sets, sometimes something that I would just bring in when I got to the charter school, it was A little bit, you know, we weren't beholden to the district necessarily, because charter schools run kind of independently of the district. But we did have, you know, our own budget to think about. And so, like, I could choose, kind of the books that we've read. And so, you know, I would choose things like Autobiography of Malcolm X and stuff like that. And I would use the budget, because I was eventually the department chair there, and so we use the budget to, like, buy those class sets. But then you're kind of, like, you kind of are teaching that book for a few years, right?

Julia Torres 13:30
Yeah, they expect you to get those copies worn out. Yeah.

Randy Ribay 13:34
So that was, you know, I spent many, many an hour repairing them with tape, and, you know, the bindings and everything myself, get them as last as long as they could. And then, now in the private school setting, you know, there's a lot more latitude in at least the school that I'm at in terms of what I get to choose to read. When I started out, it was very, very much the dead white guy cannon. Not a single person of color on the reading list for the grade that I was teaching, and now that list looks wildly different, Americana and Born a Crime and stuff like that. And yeah, so I understood, like it's different different situations. And I guess I've kind of always sort of been the person to kind of just do what I'm going to do and what I think is right in a given situation, and kind of deal with the consequences if I need to. But for the most part, yeah, well, for the most part, it worked out, I think, decently well.

Julia Torres 14:30
So I'm going to kind of skip ahead a few questions, because I think that this will work for Namrata to tell us a little bit about how Kokila plays into this work that you were just describing of changing up what is taught, changing up what's on the list I was talking about, or thinking about Kokila as I understand it, and how the goal is to tell the stories of those on the fringes or who have historically been erased, we say, marginalized, often. So. What are you hoping that teachers will do, but then also that students will take away from, not only Patron Saints, but the other books as well that are part of the Kokila imprint?

Namrata Tripathi 15:10
Yeah. I mean, I think, I think our hope is to, I mean, first and foremost is just to make the best books, right? That's just, that's our that's sort of our contract with our reader. It's like, if we're going to hand a book to a child, a middle grader, a teen, you want to give them something that like respects their sort of place in the world, and like gives them, gives them the best work that I'm capable of is like, what I need to deliver. Like, that's kind of the first thing. And so I feel like, you know, outside of any sort of mission driven work, which I think, you know, we are very mission driven, imprint is this sort of hope to make the most dynamic, powerful stories, because that's what everyone is going to want to come to. I don't, you know, I don't think of our work at all as niche. That's something that sometimes comes up when people ask like, oh, what does it mean when you're elevating marginalized stories? And does that mean that it's a very narrow focus of your list, or that your list has a very narrow focus? And my feelings sort of been, usually, to respond with saying that publishing is always interested in new voices, maybe just not equally right and and my hope is, sort of take the doors of publishing and open them wider, rather than to make it narrower. And so I think, in that way, what I hope that we get, you know, and when, when a when a reader picks up a book that is published by copula, is one that they know that they know that they're going to get something wonderful that's truly deeply thought through, but also that just basically reflects the real world that we live in. Yeah? So I don't think like reality is not niche, yeah? And that's and that lets you understand sort of life in a lot of different ways. Like Randy's book has a lot of sort of serious subject matter to it, right? Because it talks about duterte's war on drugs. It talks about, like, extrajudicial killings by the, you know, by the police. But it's also coming of age. It's also, there's a lot of, like, humor, there's a little bit of romance, there's all of the things that are part of a complete person's life. And I think our hope is that we just make books that really respect our characters and our readers as complete people, you know. And I sometimes hope that for teachers and educators that they see in our books so far have been, I mean, we're, you know, we're kind of in your imprint. We just started publishing our first books last summer, summer 2019, I didn't know that. So we're just a year in, really. And, you know, our first list had Randy's book, which is a national book work finalist. And we had Vera here in bunt, he's the night diary, and that was a Newbery Honor. And we had para love, which times the seller and you know, like art, as you're saying. And not to say like prizes are the things that are important, but to say like, they've been really well received, I think. And the thing that I hope is, like, what we try to do in curing the list is just work with the most, the smartest, most dynamic, most thoughtful people. So I feel like even when you hear Randy talk about his approach as a teacher, it tells me a lot about the kind of writer that I get to work with, right that he says, I understand the rules as they exist. I see how they are failing our kids, and what I can do to circumvent that, how I can be empowered to end a program of thinking that is potentially damaging to young minds because it is so narrow in its focus and excludes so many of us and and I think you're right, it's not just about seeing yourself, it's about seeing the world. It's about seeing, you know, sort of, yeah, the fullness of the world we live in, because that, that only, that only reinforces all our humanity, right? And I mean, like, I'm not Filipina, and I loved working on Randy's book, and there were so many points of entry, and there are so many points that I had questions, where I had to really educate myself, to to make sure that I could be as thoughtful and heavier tan as possible. And I think what I want to do is try to match the level of care, sort of rigor and compassion that I think our writers bring to their work as their editor, that's and I hope that when you see that in the book, that like a teacher or parent or kid will see our little logo on the spine and be like, I trust that thing. They make good books. Those books are dope. And like, I feel things when I read them. That's how a book touches you and and so I'd say, like, yeah, if there's anything that we're trying to do across the board, it's just to work with the most interesting minds, because they're going to tell the best stories.

Julia Torres 19:58
And like you said, I mean. Mean, these stories are a part of the real world. When we have just a really narrow subset of human experience that we present to our students in school, which has happened for decades, for centuries, then we are presenting a false idea of what reality is, that, you know, universality is only, only belongs to certain folks.

Namrata Tripathi 20:23
Yeah, recently, you know, our team, we were having discussions about, kind of, some of the books coming up on our on our future lists. And I feel like every year that goes by, you know, we're constantly trying to sort of refine our understanding of what we're trying to do. And so they came up recently, and we're talking about this in a launch movie we had for our we just launched our summer 21 list. So we let everyone in house know this book. These are the books coming up in a year from now, right?

Julia Torres 20:45
I don't know if I've seen that. I need to see that.

Namrata Tripathi 20:48
But I'm happy to give you a sneak peek. But when we do that, I kind of looked at the books and I said, what is each of these books doing? Right? And I felt like one of the things that I think is really driving our work, and I kind of look for it all of our all of our projects, is one used to say, sort of like that they work on multiple levels, that there might be sort of the joyfulness of a dad and daughter taking a ride on a motorcycle, as you see in my puppy as a motorcycle. But underneath there are layers about gentrification, about the about the contribution of immigrant families, the building of American cities. There's always more going on. And now as I think further about something that I think is part of the mission of our work, is we often look at making books as a creative act, right? Literally, it's like act of creation really, that is generative. And I think that's often seen in a really positive light, which obviously it should be, but I think that it's really important, and I think about very much also as a destructive act. And this is sort of a power that I'm trying to harness in our work, because there are narratives that have been perpetuated over time that we need to actively undo, that we need to whether you undo it by attacking it head on, or whether you undo it by saying, I see you over there from the side of my eye, and I choose to turn away, because there's a different way of looking at the story. And so one of the things that I see tapping our books is each story doesn't just give a new narrative. It's subtly or sometimes directly in like in sort of direct battle, undoes an old narrative that we feel like we don't have room for anymore, yeah, and so I love the sense of, like, we have creators who are also destroyers and yes, like, that's part of

Julia Torres 22:31
Yes doctors, right? I mean, that's like, we have this term that you may have heard of called curriculum violence, and that is when the curriculum taught in a school is culturally destructive, so meaning it is perpetuating those narratives that you were just talking about that are, for example, seeing a marginalized culture through the white gaze exactly, and that tends To be that can be and usually is destructive for the person who owns or identifies with that culture and then has to see themselves through the gaze of somebody who has often perpetuated systems of oppression, etc.

Julia Torres 23:15
So this question is for Randy, and it also connects to what you just said, Namrata, it's about creative writing. So we have removed a lot of creative writing. I'm not sure how long you've been a teacher. Randy, I've been in the secondary education field for about 16 years. Okay, so about the same time. So do you remember kind of in the beginning, you could still do creative writing projects and units. You could take time out of the whatever curriculum unit to do creative writing projects, and it wasn't a big deal.

Randy Ribay 23:54
Yeah, it was. I kind of came into teaching No Child Left Behind was kind of really starting to gain traction. And so when I came in, it was, we were pretty much already in the mode, especially in the public schools, of teaching essentially to the state test. That point, I was in New Jersey, and I could, like, still tell you the format of the test. And one of the things that they had on it was the picture prompt narrative, where, where students would get a picture and some random picture, and they'd have, like, I forget, 15 or 20 or 25 minutes to, like, write a story inspired by that picture. And so it's kind of interesting, because it was kind of, you know, asking them to do some creative writing. And so in preparing them for that, we usually had lessons on creative writing. But also, like, you know, looking back on that now as somebody who has written stories like, What a horrible way to teach creative writing like, just to put that pressure and make it this like box of like, you have to write this very quick. And then you never go back to it. You never revise it. You know, you're doing it for the test, and then you're walking away from it, and it's like something that you're being forced to create, and then you're being forced to abandon it, right? And you know, the longer I taught, the more I think the testing moved away from that, and kind of became much more just focused on analytical thinking. And, yeah, there's definitely something that's lost in that. And, and it's always something that has kind of has kind of blown my mind that people don't see that, right? Like when you practice creative writing, like you also learn to analyze better, right? Like, if I write something and I have to create realistic characters, I become better at looking at other stories and analyzing the way the authors created those characters. If I'm trying to create a symbol, I'm better at analyzing symbolism, right? So these two things go hand in hand, and I think we've kind of lost sight of that, because the nature of standardized texting is to essentially decontextualize everything for what we think of as like an artificial progress or benchmark of where students should be, which is something that concerns me.

Julia Torres 26:13
Right, and the benchmark moves right, that's what concerns me. And what is so difficult for me is that the every time my students feel like they're approaching exemplary or proficient, they'll just move the goalpost and they'll say, you know, you're still not there, sorry.

Randy Ribay 26:29
And even I mean, inherently, tests are a tool of white supremacy and kind of continue, continuing to perpetuate these systems. So even if it's, you know, we could even move the conversation beyond like, are they going to get a passing score on the test to, like, what does it mean to have a passing score in, you know, any kind of given subject? And, yeah, like, you work with kids, you know how individual it is. Yeah, there are trends that you want to see in patterns, but it comes down to so much more of just like, where are they coming in, and then where are they, where are they leaving? And like, how much have you inspired them, kind of to take ownership over whatever it is, to get them to love that, that subject, that area, and that's something that is, yeah, it drives me crazy, because there's just so much I think that is that is ruined about learning about education by by the nature, the very nature and existence of standardized tests.

Julia Torres 27:27
I agree, and there's so much focus, like you were mentioning, on the analytical and on argumentative writing. So I want to go back to something that you said about feeling inspired at some point you decided to try this thing called writing for young people, and I would love for our listeners to who are also readers of your book, and potentially your other books as well. Can you tell us just a little bit about how that happened? How did you become a teacher writer, and then, how did you decide? How did you find your way to Kokila?

Randy Ribay 27:59
So this is a long story, but I'll try to make it as quick as possible, or as brief as possible. Yeah, like I said earlier, like I just kind of went through school doing what I was supposed to be doing, right, getting the grades I was supposed to get. And it was really in 11th grade when I hit, when I went into the IB program before. I hadn't done like, pre IB or anything. I had moved from Michigan to Colorado, and so when I moved, My counselor was like, Hey, you have pretty good grades. You should try this program. And I was like, Okay, sure. And at first, it just kicked my butt, because the IB program requires a lot of critical thinking. In a way, I felt like I had never been asked to think about anything before. So for the first time, I felt like I was really challenged, and almost like woke up intellectually in terms of using my brain to kind of question the world, not just regurgitate or not just kind of do what I think the teacher wanted me to do. I mean, we had a class called theory of knowledge, which is kind of all about, you know, epistemology, how we know what we know. And in that class, we would like analyze silent films, we would analyze linguistics. We were given assignments like, come up with the perfect school, all these things that I've never been asked to do before.

Julia Torres 29:13
Yeah, you're the perfect school. Yeah, that's awesome. We have to talk about that later.

Randy Ribay 29:19
Okay, and so that was, I think that was kind of the start of where I started to question kind of what I was doing and why I was doing it right for the first time. Then when I went to college, I went in as an aerospace engineering major with an Air Force ROTC scholarship, and that was largely part of kind of what my family had pushed me into doing. And after a year of that, I was just like, No thanks. I'm done. I don't want to be part of the military. I don't want to be an engineer. Switched over to English just because I thought it was interesting. And I didn't really know you could, like, study stories full time. So I thought that was cool. And that was really, I think, where things started to change for me, because for the first time, I really started. To Read, read stories, read like James Baldwin, Gene Toomer, Sandra, Cisneros, Toni Morrison, you know, WEB DuBois, even though I'm not black, I'm not Latinx. Well, arguably, maybe I am, because of Spanish colonialism, but I was reading so many of these books that kind of gave voice to my own experiences in a way that I had never read before. And, you know, reading about double consciousness, you know, obviously I'm not black, but kind of I could really relate to that idea of, like, Filipino and American, and kind of these two parts of my identity that don't really fit together, because I'd always grown up with people trying to place me ethnically by asking me the the question of, what are you? And over again, horrible and and so when I was reading that stuff, it kind of started to make sense. And then I kind of start, I started to understand, I think, the like literature not just as escapism, but literature as something that can help you explore and understand yourself and kind of make sense of yourself and make sense of your community in a way that I had never really thought of before. And so when I decided eventually to go into teaching specifically with English, it was the idea of I wanted to make kids feel that in a way that I had never felt when I was in high school. I didn't want kids just feeling like they were doing assignments for the sake of doing assignments. I wanted them to really understand the power of literature and like all the different ways it can actually impact us and, in turn, actually impact the world.

Julia Torres 31:37
So this kind of connects with a question that I think a lot of students ask because they don't see themselves as creators, which is so depressing now that I'm saying it out loud. They don't see themselves as readers. They don't self identify as readers, and then, because of what we've done to them, often in the school system, in many places, not all, but many, they don't see themselves as creators. So they don't see themselves as a future you who could be writing for young people. So, namata, could you tell us a little bit just about how publishing and own voices, texts, how that kind of came to be. How does the publishing industry go about finding writers and then, you know, editing, producing and acquiring books like this.

Namrata Tripathi 32:20
Right? So, I mean, that's a conversation we could have all day because, but there's, you know, I can give you the sort of broad strokes overview of how it's sort of often been done, and maybe how things are changing a little bit. You know, I think traditionally, publishing has been a largely, sort of elite or whatever that means, right for all of the things that codes in sort of not very inclusive community of people who could consider themselves culture makers, right? So this, it's often been like, if you look at the demographics and even publishing today, of people who work in publishing, it's, you know, largely CIS, white hat able employees who work in publishing houses, very female, though editorial and children's books. Excuse more female than male for using this binary. But like generally, what's happened is this sort of a series of gatekeepers who either funnel in or stand in the way of stories making their way to publication and to readers. So generally, say, like someone writes a book, they work on it, they feel like it's in good shape, they're ready to send it out. They usually try to find what's called like a literary agent, right? And literary agents work all over the country. They work at big agencies. Some of them are individual shops, and you can, like, send them your work. They read through all of the submissions that they receive, and they decide who to represent, right? Then they represent someone. And then they decide, like, oh, this book feels like it'd be a really good fit for not just this publisher, but this particular editor at this at this publishing house, a big part of their job is to sort of be a matchmaker, and to really cultivate those relationships. They know where to place a text, and then they send the book out to editors all over the country, largely in New York, but all over the country and and from there, hopefully someone feels that they're they, you know, the text resonates with them. They're a match for it, which also brings up its own problems. Because if, if publishing has largely been sort of white, middle class and coastal for most of its history, and you're someone who's writing from outside of that experience, is someone going to be like, Oh yeah, that book really resonated with me. It may be a little bit harder to have that sense of connection, right? Which might explain why, when you look at the stats around which books get published. So if you look in like children's literature, you know, there are more books about animals and inanimate objects, like, you know, so bears and trucks, basically. And there are. Books about all children of color combined, so black, indigenous POC kids all combined. Few fewer books about them than there are about trucks and bears. So, you know. So there's a lot of ways in which the limitations of sort of our own indoctrination has influenced the industry, which influences the books that have been available to kids, which then perpetuates the cycle with your question about Own Voices. Sorry, did you want to say something else?

Julia Torres 35:25
No, I was just gonna say that when you when you are saying these things, I'm very much thinking of it as a network of people who are connected to other people. So if you don't have the connections, if you so, there's the cultural piece where whoever's reading your manuscript has to be able to see the vision. And if they're not culturally aware or even racially literate themselves, then that can present a lot of problems. Racially or ethnically literate, that can present some problems. But then I'm seeing like they've got to be connected to people who will then move your project along, to other folks who will also be culturally or ethnically literate, perhaps.

Namrata Tripathi 36:01
Right, right? And, you know, there are certainly, there's certainly houses who have been out looking for writers from a lot of different backgrounds for a long time, who removed some of those hurdles and gatekeepers where they'll say, you know, they are open to submissions that are unagented, things like this. So there's, there's that's existed, and I think more and more big houses are starting to do that as time goes on. One of the things like, sukukila, you know, we're a small intern at a very big house. Penguin. Random House is the largest publishing company in the world, and for us, we felt like it was important to try to make like, reaching us more accessible. One of the things we did is, sort of, we have an open submissions period every fall where it's like anyone can send in their thing, and we're just going to make sure that we take the rest of the year to read through and respond, you know, to like all of those projects, which is a tough thing to do because we're a small group, but we're doing our best to go through every single one. So we spend a chunk of our, you know, time every week to like, go through all of the hundreds and hundreds of submissions that come in. Yeah, but, you know, a lot of houses now are really interested in finding writers from a lot of backgrounds. You asked about your own voices, and that, you know, I'm guessing a lot of your readers know, but in case they don't like that sort of about writing within sort of a cultural expertise of your own experience, right? Not writing outside of your experience. So I think a lot of a lot of publishing is interested in finding more Own Voices of writers. And that's great. I have some concerns around that too, because I think that if it's seen in a sort of superficial level, it can be a way of us like outsourcing the responsibility of having cultural competence to the writer themselves. And if we as editors and sort of publishing professionals can't interrogate their work in a way that makes it better, then we're failing them in a way that we haven't. You know that we've provided that service to white writers for decades in in the industry, and to say that now we're interested in writers from other backgrounds, but we can't actually give them the tools to succeed in the way that we gave white writers to succeed feels pretty problematic. Yeah. So, you know, so that's to say that there's a lot of people who want to read the work of young writers coming up from all different backgrounds with many different stories to different stories to tell. I think there's a real hunger for this, and I think publishing is catching up to realizing that we have like, a, there's like a real market, right? Like, there's, it's not just like a responsibility and sort of moralistic way. It's just sort of like, this is where there's great storytelling to be found. Yeah, so that's there. But I wouldn't. I think I would be lying if I didn't acknowledge how challenging it can be to get your work in front of the eyes of an editor at a major publishing house, because it the system has been designed to not give everyone access.

Julia Torres 38:38
Wow, and that's so important for us to hear and think about, because I have a lot of students from suburbia who say that they want to be writers, and they'll give me their manuscript in a Google Doc. That's like a 300 page fantasy about, like, fan fiction, yo, it is big right now the children's fan fiction, they love it. So Randy, I we have not talked much about Patron Saints, and I'd love for the folks, we're going to talk a little bit more later, because Randy and I are going to do a Facebook Live for them, but I'd love to hear just a little bit about that process of how Patron Saints came to Kokila. How did you come up with the story? And then what are you hoping teachers will do in the best of circumstances? Teachers and students will do with the book in the best circumstances?

Randy Ribay 39:28
So, yeah, that's that's a lot. Again, I'll try to.

Julia Torres 39:34
I do that, more questions in one they hate when I write tests. Yeah.

Randy Ribay 39:38
So the novel itself kind of started with me, kind of deciding to explore some of my own questions and confusions about my own racial, ethnic, national identity as somebody born in the Philippines, raised in the United States, kind of had lived in different places, but primarily raised in predominantly white communities. Um, and intertwined in that is also obviously the story of the drug war, you know, if you haven't read it yet, Filipino American teen whose cousin in the Philippines is killed as part of the ongoing drug war in the Philippines, tries to figure out what happened to his cousin. And so those two things for me, you know, at the same time I was starting to think about what to write next, I was reading about the drug war, which started in 2016 when Rodrigo Duterte became president of the Philippines, like on the very day, this is one of his platform promises, right, tough on crime, law and order. And on the very day he was inaugurated, they started and, like, 40 people were killed that day as a result of operations that day. So I was thinking about this a lot and reading about it a lot, and kind of had this question of like, well, what is my what is my role to kind of speak out against this? You know, I feel it's wrong. I feel it's wrong. I feel the violation of human rights, constitutional rights, but I'm not in the Philippines, right? And I haven't lived there since I left when I was born, when I was like, one. And so what right do I have, like, really talk about what's happening over there. I still have family over there, and still friends over there. And so I had that question, but then I also had the question of, you know, what would teen me have thought about all of this, right?

Julia Torres 41:22
I was like question to just like, start with that, yeah,

Randy Ribay 41:26
Teenager as being a Filipino American, like, if I were reading about all of this, kind of, what would I think about it, and how would I process it? So it kind of started with that question, and me kind of exploring what that means. And so I knew right away that I needed to, that it was a story about a Filipino American kid processing what's going on in the Philippines. It's not a story about the drug war. It's not a story about the Philippine perspective of the drug war, right? It's very much so Filipino American boy is trying to process it and trying to figure out, you know, what it means, and kind of his family's connections to it, and kind of the deeper things that that unearths right? Because it's all connected to each other. It's all manifestation of these, these deeper histories. And so that's kind of like where it started. When I was working on it, I didn't know, I honestly didn't know if anybody was going to pick it up, because I had never read a story about a Filipino American teen boy in my life. I had never seen one on the cover of a book. You know, any all the Filipino American literature that I had read up to that point either poetry or written for adults, and so I'd never seen it in children's literature. You know, at the point I was starting to work on this, Erin and Trotta Kelly had already, I think she had won the Newberry, or was like, she won it while I was writing it, or when I was working at, I don't know, but she was like, Really, the only other Filipino American author that I knew. And then later on, there's like, a few more of us now, and Melissa de la Cruz, I learned about a little bit later, but for the most part, I just didn't know. I didn't know people would be interested. I didn't know if people would be connected with it. But I've always kind of, you know, kind of like what I was talking about my teaching. I kind of just follow what I think is right, regardless of consequences for it, other books previously, two previously. And so the first one is kind of about a group of kids of color who play Dungeons and Dragons and go on a road trip. And then second one is about two friends who kind of live in a fictional mashup of like Philly and Camden, which is where I was teaching and living. And one is really good at basketball gets a scholarship to go to a private school, and kind of focuses on, like, the fallout and the friendship of that.

Julia Torres 43:48
Like, I can see the cover of that one. Does it have? Is it orange and black or no?

Randy Ribay 43:53
Yeah. Like, probably most books about basketball.

Julia Torres 43:58
That's fair. Yeah, I can see it because I know I have it, but anyway, keep going.

Randy Ribay 44:02
And so I included, like, I included Filipino American characters in those books, but I didn't like directly, I guess, confront the idea of Filipino American identity. And so patron states them nothing was kind of my decision to do that right at that time. I'd also my agent of the time had left the industry, so I also had to query a new agent, kind of like, as I was working and getting this manuscript prepared and ready to ready to send out, I basically had to find a new agent. And that was kind of scary because, you know, so there's always this thought of like, nobody else is going to want me the first one was a fluke, and so on and so forth. But I found a great agent, and Beth Phelan, who is wonderful agent and also organizes hashtag DV Pit, which is another incredible way that, you know, as Namrata was talking about, kind of widening the doors of publishing. And you know, when we were talking about where to send it, it was kind of a matter of like, which. Editors are going to connect with this, right? And and she was really excited about something. She heard that Namrata was starting up at Penguin with coquila at that point. It didn't exist yet, but she had kind of known about it, had an ear to the ground, and was like, we should definitely consider submitting to her, you know. And we submitted to a few other people as well. And eventually went to auction. And, you know, I decided to go with Kokila and Namrata, because I just thought what they were doing was so great and kind of aligned with, you know, the ethos of how I had been kind of writing in this kind of very mission driven approach to how I live my life. And I liked that the imprint was kind of doing that itself. When I went to auction, we had, like, a few different offers. I ultimately decided to go with Koki love because I really liked the idea of, like, the entire imprint is doing this right. It's not just like one editor who's trying to do it, but it's like a network of people who kind of get it, and are going to give me support along the way, as opposed to just a single editor who kind of understands it. And so that was important to me, and I'm very, very glad that you did end up going with Kokila. Me too. Oh, you had a second question that I think I completely forgot. Was it about like, how teachers will use it?

Julia Torres 46:20
Well, yeah, that's end here, because I know that Kokila is going to be coming out. I know one, I can't, I can't remember the title of it right now. But number two, you talked about it in a penguin preview. So I saw the cover of it. Beautiful. Rainbow hair on this. Oh yeah, my rainbow. Oh okay. Well, all right, so I know there are going to be lots more coming out. And I just want to know for our teachers, for our newer teachers, who sometimes they have to fight that battle. They have to go to people and defend the use of the books that they want in classrooms, which is unfortunate, but in the most restrictive environments you do have to have, you know, this is how this is going to tie into my curriculum. So I'd love to know just from each of you if you want to talk in general or specifically about Patron Saints. Either way is good. But How can teachers fight that fight? Well, how ideally would they use it with students in classrooms?

Randy Ribay 47:16
So I'll go ahead first, I guess, as a teacher. So first of all, like, if you're, if you're looking at the Common Core standards, there's, you know, there's a million things you can do with the book that also aligns with the Common Core standards. But deeper than that, you know, I think, I think, first of all, giving students the space to discuss and create their own questions. A lot of times, we're used to asking the students the questions, right? Here are the questions I came up with. But I think one of the more powerful things we can do is teach students how to ask questions, how to ask interesting, insightful questions, and then giving them the space to do that with whatever they're reading, be it Patron Saints of Nothing, or, you know, anything else. And so, you know, I feel like I'm not great at marketing my book, because I'm like, yeah, if you love Patron Saints of Nothing you should use it. You can also use, like, whatever else you want to use that your students would be down with.

Julia Torres 48:11
But I think that what's important about your book is it can tie in with, if we want, social studies, but it can also tie in with ethics and Cultural Studies. It can, it can tie in in a lot of different ways. What's going to be so important is that, folks, I love what you said about supporting students in doing that critical consciousness development work, so that they can come up with the questions, and that it's not always the teacher who's having to create. Is there a teaching guide that exists for it already?

Namrata Tripathi 48:39
That's what I was just I couldn't remember. I thought maybe we had one I was looking to see.

Randy Ribay 48:43
I don't think so. Yeah, kind of theoretically opposed to a teaching.

Julia Torres 48:50
I understand. I mean, I definitely understand that.

Randy Ribay 48:53
I think that it's, it's again, that doesn't help the marketing.

Julia Torres 48:57
In my environment, we have so many people who did the three week summer camp and then learned to be teachers from, like, Teach for America, which, if you're listening, and that's actually what I was. I was Teach For America originally, and that happens a lot in my environment. And so folks do not have language arts degrees necessarily, or like, English degrees, so they don't really know how to teach literature a lot of times. So the teaching guide supports people who are maybe like they were, you know, a film studies major, or, like a philosophy major. I think sometimes the teaching guy can support people in understanding how it's like a fast track to understand how you can align with the standards. But I can totally respect, if you're philosophically opposed, need to happen for your books.

Namrata Tripathi 49:39
What I would think there, Randy, the talk that you gave at Allen after NCTE, there was a speech, and I'm sure it's probably available online, I don't know, maybe link to it in the podcast notes or something. I feel like that. I think is a really excellent tool for teachers in thinking about how discuss. I mean, not just Randy's book, all all books like, all the all the work that they teach. Because, you know, he really went into kind of a discussion of, like, how do you look at something through a feminist lens? How do you look at something through a Marxist lens? How do you look at something through a, you know, anti racist lens? How do you look through something through a sort of post colonial lens? And I think all of those tools are applicable across so many titles, but particularly on Patron Saints of Nothing. And I think, like, even as his editor, where, like, I don't have a background as an educator, you know, but my whole job is to be in conversation with the author so that the questions I might ask Will prod, you know, will prod the process to get it to a deeper truth. And that means having to find inside me those questions to, like, nurture that deepest curiosity and sort of, and I remember thinking about things, but like linguistics, where it's like, okay, I'm not a Tagalog speaker, but I don't have to learn about all of these other languages from the Philippines too and how they interact and sort of, sometimes the sort of cultural hierarchy that might exist. And then it was like, now I have to learn about there's, like, maritime law things I was googling. This is the question I have about how we label this thing in the ocean. You know, like, all of this stuff comes up. And I think that that, to me, was such a good exercise in recognizing how many avenues of exploration a book could open to you. And so I think, like, probably Randy's speech from from Alan, in in, you know, in in conversation with the book will be a real what would lead to really robust discussions in classrooms.

Randy Ribay 51:30
Yeah, and I don't mean to like, come off of, like, totally anti teacher guide, but I think the danger, the danger in in training, pre service teachers, is, if you teach it too, too prescriptive or too here's the script, here's what you do, here are the questions to ask. Then, then we're not teaching them to be critical thinkers. as educators, right? We want students to be critical thinkers when they engage with text like we also need to train teachers to be critical thinkers and how they're engaging with their pedagogy. And I think, yeah, and I think sometimes that's, that's the danger, and having taught initially under Teach for America, I had to go back and unlearn a lot of that.

Julia Torres 52:11
I bet I've seen it. I've seen the best of it, and I've seen the worst of it. And I think some folks have a natural, natural propensity to be teachers and to be critical thinkers. And it sounds like you're a very balanced brain type of person, if you did the aerospace stuff and then you also were doing the aerospace stuff.

Randy Ribay 52:29
Well, I was like that kid that was like scraping by, you know, and like praying for a good curve on the exam.

Julia Torres 52:39
I cried a lot in math class. Science was always fine for me, but when you had to do math, I would just, I think it was an emotional thing, because I have friends who are math teachers, and they tell me that half of their job is just believe helping their students believe that they have the math in them. So part of my job is helping the students believe that they have the stories in them. It's just about valuing their own story enough to get it out and to then be okay with that process of tweaking it and like refining it. And as you were mentioning, you know, that process of doing the research and and having to go into the text and ask yourself questions that a reader might ask, I think that's really powerful for teachers to think about too as because I hate that a lot of our job is seen as correcting student writing, because really, we're supposed to be more like a mentor or a coach or somebody who's just helping them to find, you know, that beautiful, like we're taking a rough diamond and shaping it into, you know, the finished one, Not the child, but whatever they're working on. But anyway, there any final, you know, thoughts that you have for for educators who might be listening to this podcast?

Randy Ribay 53:49
You know, I think educators who are here might, might be getting it a little bit already. But, you know, I think, I think so much is important, so much more can be done with kind of connecting with each other, connecting with other educators, connecting with researchers, connecting with academics, connecting with people in publishing industry who kind of get it right. You know, things like hashtag, disrupt texts, Project lit community, right? Like these kind of grassroots efforts of bringing those people across these different realms that are all trying to do the same thing, essentially together, like there's so much value in that. And, you know, so if anybody out there is listening, like you don't have to do this alone, like it's impossible to do it alone, right? And like, a lot of the stuff that we're talking about, like, I didn't just, like, suddenly realize this one day, right? I got it from talking with other people, reading things that were out there, you know, and in all of that. And so I just encourage, like, anyone who's out there, like, connect, like, find that community who's kind of doing that good work, and connect with it. And there can be, you know, so much of your own growth is going to be tied into that. But then also, you can bring a lot to that community through the way that you grow.

Julia Torres 55:05
Absolutely, absolutely any, any final words of advice, Namrata for our our kids who want to be writers, our teachers who are coaches of future writers. And then what can we do to support the publishing industry?

Namrata Tripathi 55:20
So I don't know that I have a piece of advice, but I think I have just, like a to say thank you to educators, right? Because I think we're all sort of in different parts of the same work and and we couldn't do it without without the work that you guys do. And I think, like, kind of to what Randy was saying about sort of going on your own journey, and how that can enhance the experience of your kids. I think we feel the same way as editors and publishers, which is that we want to do the good work, but also we want to push ourselves to continue to do doing better work, because that's our responsibility. And so I think like, if you have you know you're teaching creative writing, you're working with young students, especially working with students of color or from other marginalized backgrounds, like the gift of listening thoughtfully and truly to their stories. You know is, is one that, like we're all going to benefit from if you can help them know how valuable their voices are. It's like that could change somebody else's life down the down the road, right? You could be that first sort of inflection point in a narrative taking a shape that one day will become the books that you know someone holds dear in the way that we all have books that we hold dear. So I feel like that's it is sort of it's hard to imagine so far in the future. I think that power really rests in in educators now, and I am very aware of that and grateful for it, and also sort of imploring educators to be, you know, to to be present for their young writers in that way, and then in terms of, like, how you can support publishing being more inclusive, publishing more diverse titles, that kind of thing. Certainly when people often say, like, you know, vote with your pocketbook, right? It's the same thing. It's like, you know, I know that a lot of educators from talking about you actually like the ways in which you work within the systems and the confines that you have to have more representative libraries. Titles you need, to get the funding to get the kinds of titles you need. And I know that's probably a dance that is very, very intricate that I that I'm quite outside of, but I think doing things that works, like spending the money on the books that are going to that are the kinds of books you want to see more of, lets us in publishing? Know? Oh, these books are being adopted by schools and libraries are being taught. It's increasing our sales. We're going to publish more of them, because ultimately, we're a for profit business. And seeing that is in, you know, is maybe one of the most concrete ways in which any editor who's trying to bring in a book can look the case for the next book that they want to bring in to be like, look at these notes. Like, look at these numbers. The numbers tell the story. You know. They are not, they're not biased in this way. They're just, you know, so, so I guess that would be it too, is just support the work of the writers you love, and really look at how you are diversifying your bookshelves. Because it is, you know, it's an act of sort of sort of conscientiousness and rebellion that you have to engage in.

Julia Torres 58:25
I love it. I love it. I love it. If people are listening and you're still with us, rebellion, destruction at the same time, new thing that is your learning objective. Thank you so much to both of you for your time, for your work, for your wisdom. Randy, please keep writing because folks want to read it. Namrata, please keep informing me of the amazing things that Kokila is doing so that I can help promote them, because I'm all about it, and I look forward to seeing you both again soon, hopefully talking to you about Thank you.

Randy Ribay 58:57
Thank you, thank you.

Namrata Tripathi 58:58
Thank you so much. You.