Though hundreds of new YA books hit the shelves every year, the number that feature inclusive storylines is still frustratingly slim. A new imprint called Salaam Reads is aiming to help change that.
Under Simon & Schuster, the imprint’s goal is to publish books for young readers ranging from picture books to YA, focusing primarily on Muslim stories by Muslim writers. It’s also spearheaded by executive editor Zareen Jaffery, a Muslim woman.
But what started out as a quest for greater representation has morphed into an act of resistance. Of course, Salaam Reads never intended to resist anything other than the stereotypes plaguing the media like the pervasive “terrorist,” but after the Trump administration’s executive order banning entry into America from seven Muslim-majority nations, it seems the imprint’s debut is more important than ever.
As the executive editor of Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, Jaffery, a Pakistani-American who has been in the publishing industry for 15 years, has made it her mission to seek out work from the under-represented. Her focus wasn’t limited to Muslim stories, but finding their stories in particular was proving to be difficult.
Jaffery approached vice president and publisher Justin Chanda, who suggested the Salaam Reads imprint as a solution. Salaam — the Arabic word for “peace” — would serve as a place where readers could easily find Muslim stories and Muslim writers could find a home and maybe even inspire others to start writing.
A year before Salaam Reads launched, Jaffery found Amina’s Voice by Hena Khan, an established writer with six books under her belt, including the much talked about It's Ramadan, Curious George. Her latest book is a middle school novel about a Pakistani-American girl who balances her culture and religion with trying to fit in as a sixth grader. It’s a sweet contemporary story featuring friendship, family, and the challenges of the world changing around her.
Khan found out about the creation of Salaam Reads with the rest of the world on February 24, 2016, and soon after, Jaffery made the offer to publish Khan’s book. “I knew she had news. I thought it was [going to be] a great series or a wonderful sale or something, but I had no idea it was going to be Salaam Reads. When that was all announced, I was so excited,” Khan said.
Amina’s Voice will be the first book to be published under the imprint on March 14, but it’s not the only book Salaam Reads will publish this spring. Karuna Riazi’s The Gauntlet is a fantasy about a girl named Farah who, along with her friends, is tasked with rescuing her little brother after they find themselves trapped in a terrifying game.
Riazi, who started out as a book blogger in 2008, was one of the original members of the We Need Diverse Books campaign. It’s how she met Jaffery and heard about Salaam Reads, which was still taking shape. While Jaffrey asked people in the industry for Muslim stories, she heard about Riazi’s manuscript, and last February she offered her a book deal. On March 28, The Gauntlet will be the second book to come out of Salaam Reads.
It’s clear that Salaam Reads’s first two books — a contemporary story and a fantasy, one from a seasoned author and one a debut — will truly help set the tone for the diverse stories from Muslims about Muslims. (There are more books on the way, including a young adult novel from S.K. Ali, called Saints and Misfits; and picture books from poet Mark Gonzales and Jamilah Thompkins-Bigelow.)
“I know that, in America, it seems like Muslims are synonymous with Desis or Arabs, and certainly those voices will be part of Salaam Reads. But that’s not all, and it’s really important to me that that’s not all,” Jaffery said, “I want Salaam Reads to depict the ummah [community] in its breadth of diversity. That’s part of the reason why I still reach out to people and artists because what I find is that the concept of privilege is something I'm hit with every day in my job. What I find is that the stories that are being told are stories that center on middle-class or upper middle-class, college-educated people.”
Though she notes that those authors are “writing what they know and they have the luxury of time and the luxury of, in certain cases, taking a creative writing class,” Jaffery also notes that “many Muslims in this country are working class. We need to be able to honestly depict those experiences too without fetishizing their pain, which the perspective of someone who’s not in that community can often do.” As such, the imprint has an open-submissions policy so that writers can skip the gatekeepers and move right into the hands of the editors. It’s a pivotal step that increases access, which leads to more representation.
Jaffery, Khan, and Riazi have been voracious readers their entire lives, yet when asked when they first saw themselves in a story, Jaffery and Khan both mentioned it was in their 20s, while reading Jhumpa Lahiri. (For Jaffery, it was the author’s Pulitzer Prize-winning short -story collection Interpreter of Maladies; for Khan, it was The Namesake, which was turned into a film starring Kal Penn.) “Art is a celebration…and to never have these pieces of my own personal experience celebrated made me feel like they were things that I shouldn’t be happy about,” Jaffery said about being a child of immigrants and not finding herself in the books she devoured.
Riazi, a college student majoring in English, feels a bit differently. “I still feel like I haven’t, to be honest…I still want to see a girl like me, someone who is biracial,” in books. (She is half black and half Bangladeshi.) But she’s not letting that deter her from writing: “Maybe it’ll have to come from me,” she notes.
“I’m working towards our own irrelevance,” Jaffery adds. “I want there to be so many Muslim stories [where] having a separate imprint just doesn’t make sense anymore.” It’s a future that’s not quite here yet, but well worth the wait.
