Isabel Millán is Assistant Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Oregon. She is author and illustrator of the queer bilingual children’s picture book Chabelita’s Heart/El corazón de Chabelita.
In this magisterial study, Isabel Millán sweeps across all of North America—Mexico, the U.S., and Canada—to recover a genealogy of queer and trans of color picture books. With incisive questions and insightful close readings, Millán shows how picture books are sites through which queer and trans of color communities have “colored,” or reimagined, themselves to create new worlds. Comprehensive, lively, and inspiring, Coloring into Existence is a landmark in the field of children’s literature. -- Robin Bernstein, author of Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights Offers a significant and distinctive contribution to the field, building upon recent scholarship on queerness in/and children’s literature and childhood. Coloring into Existence is cutting edge and making original theoretical and scholarly interventions, speaking in important ways to growing efforts to diversify children’s literature. -- Julia L Mickenberg, author of Tales for Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Children's Literature