WITMonth Day 1 | Year seven, let's go!

Happy August, happy WITMonth!!! As always, it's such a joy to kick off the month seeing everyone's book posts and excitement and love, there's really nothing like it. Folks have already spent the past week or so posting their WITMonth TBRs or stacks of potential reads and it's just so wonderful to see so many readers from across the world joining in this collective effort.

For my part, I plan on spending August continuing this years-long crusade and rambling on about many of the same issues as usual, as well as some new ones. I've got a few new ideas for this month, we'll see if things work out. As I laid out in my last post, I plan to spend my WITMonth focusing on women writers in translation from particularly underrepresented backgrounds. For me, this will mostly mean focusing on African women in translation (including diaspora, Afro-Latinx, and Afro-Caribbean writers), as well as Indigenous, South Asian, and Middle Eastern writers. This is not to suggest that other underrepresented WIT are not worthy of greater attention in the English-speaking literary world, rather it's my own small way of addressing the ever prevalent gap in having these works adequately translated and promoted in English. For a better understanding of this on a global scale, check out this year's 50 Day Countdown to WITMonth, which highlighted authors from precisely these underrepresented backgrounds, including many who despite widespread acclaim in their native languages have never been translated into English. I'll be writing about the list much more in depth later this month, but suffice to say that compiling it was a fairly wonderful experience for me.

There's so much I hope to see happen this August, and so much I know is going to happen - publisher discounts, gorgeous photos, amazing vlogs, insightful book reviews, brilliant booklists, and so much more - that I'm almost no longer worried about my own role in this all. I have my own plans, but WITMonth marches on with or without me, and that too is nothing less than a pure joy.

Year seven, let's go.