When I discovered that Newbery Honoree and Stonewall Award winner Kyle Lukoff would be doing a reading at a nearby children’s library last Saturday, I immediately changed my plans and went to hear him. I wasn’t disappointed.
Lukoff read several of his books, including the Stonewall Award-winning When Aidan Became a Brother, If You’re a Kid Like Gavin: The True Story of a Young Trans Activist (co-authored with Gavin Grimm), Max and the Talent Show (part of his early chapter book series), and A Storytelling of Ravens, his first book, which isn’t LGBTQ inclusive but is an absolutely fun tale about collective nouns, including a sloth of bears, a smack of jellyfish, and a nuisance of cats. (Since it’s not LGBTQ-inclusive, it’s not in my database, but you should go get a copy anyway (Bookshop; Amazon), along with his other not-explicitly-LGBTQ-inclusive book, Explosion at the Poem Factory (Bookshop; Amazon), which is a wonderful wealth of wordplay.)
He was an engaging reader, pausing occasionally to ask questions of the young listeners (mostly ages 5 to 8, if I had to guess), and to point out details of the illustrations. Before becoming a full-time writer, he was a children’s librarian, and his ease around children and their questions and comments was obvious.
What did the children comment and ask about? Nothing about gender or being trans, though all of the books he read touched on that, and he noted that he was trans, too. No, the children just rolled with that; one commented on the cloud formations that Aidan and his father painted on their walls; another asked Lukoff why he liked books so much. I’m guessing that some of his audiences do ask him questions about being trans, but clearly that’s not always the first or only thing that springs to mind when children hear his stories. It’s terrific and important that his books share insights into what it means to be trans, but they’re also just great stories with lots of other facets (and a sometimes subtle humor that doesn’t get mentioned nearly enough). That’s one of the many things I like about his work—he shows his trans characters in the fullness of their lives. They remind me as a cisgender lesbian to see and treat trans people for who they fully are, just as I expect straight people to treat me that way. I hope they have that effect on other readers.
Lukoff also had his two middle-grade books on display, Too Bright to See (a Newbery Honor Book, National Book Award finalist, and Stonewall Award winner), and his more recent Different Kinds of Fruit, although he did not read from them since most of the audience was too young (despite the protestations of one eager eight-year-old who was touting her reading skills).
If you’d like to bring Lukoff to your own library, school, or other event, you can reach out to him via his website. I was lucky he decided to come up to my part of the world this weekend.
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