Dear YA,

I didn’t read you when I was a young adult. I read literature, the books my teachers assigned to me, the ones that would force people to take me seriously: Heart of Darkness, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby, Lord of the Flies. These books were bleak; their pages riddled with violence, assault, racism, misogyny. They were dark and complicated. Explicit, tragic. The authors were always straight, often male, usually white.