The increasing prominence of both historic and current treatments of the American South in recent children’s literature draws attention to a region that is decidedly (and increasingly) complex in terms of race, class, gender, and politics. In keeping with the 2025 presidential theme, “Visibility,” and with the convention taking place in the heart of the Southern United States, this panel considers the myriad ways that the American South has been made visible in both a historical and a contemporary sense by recent children’s literature. The papers on this panel offer a diverse range of considerations on this subject, emphasizing marginalized voices and topics within both children’s literature and the South. In doing so, they stress the ways that late-twentieth and twenty-first-century children’s texts can enrich our contemporary understanding of the historical American South, as well as how can they make visible the current reality of the region.

In the first paper, Maude Hines analyzes seven ghost stories for young people—ranging from Luke Wallin’s The Slavery Ghosts (1983) to Justina Ireland’s Ophie’s Ghosts (2021)—that engage the long shadow of chattel slavery in the United States, in which ghosts and children alike are sites of tension between the seen and the unseen. This talk reads literary ghosts as a way of making visible what has been hidden: the children in these stories can see the ghosts adults often cannot, while the ways living characters react to those ghosts suggest different ways of relating to the past. Some of the stories insist that what has happened can never be changed, focusing on changing the present; others depict children making time-traveling interventions. In their various relationships to history and region, these books connect their child characters to the past or alienate them from it, presenting slavery's ghosts as individual souls or representatives of structures that allow the past to continue to haunt us in the present.

Next, Kenneth Kidd builds upon the late John Wharton Lowe’s magisterial 2016 study, Calpyso Magnolia: The Crosscurrents of Caribbean and Southern Literature, situating the American South in the transnational context of Caribbean, inter-American, and Latin American literature and adapting the term “circum-Caribbean.” Taking Florida as a focal point, this presentation explores the development of what Kidd calls Floricuban and Floribbean children’s literature. Floricuban children’s literature develops from exile and heritage traditions of Cuban-American writing specifically, while Floribbean literature—only now materializing—stems from the broader (circum-)Caribbean diaspora/context and reflects circumCaribbean themes and concerns. Key texts will include Carlos Hernandez’s Sal and Gabi Break the Universe (2019), Celia C. Pérez’s Strange Birds (2019), Jarod Roselló’s middle-grade graphic novels Red Panda & Moon Bear (2019) and Red Panda & Moon Bear: The Curse of the Evil Eye (2020), and Terry Catasús Jennings’ Definitely Dominguita books.

In the third paper, Karen Chandler reveals how in the last thirty years southern Indigenous and African American persons and communities have gained increased (if still limited) visibility in children’s literature, with a pair of particularly revealing books exploring the generative nature of Indigenous-Black alliances. Tim Tingle’s picturebook Crossing Bok Chitto: A Choctaw Tale of Friendship and Freedom (2008) and Brenda Woods’ middle-grade novel My Name is Sally Little Song (2006) foreground culturally specific behaviors and values of antebellum childhoods rooted in Black and Choctaw and Seminole communities, respectively. Both Crossing Bok Chitto and My Name is Sally Little Song portray the tension between young Black and Indigenous characters’ community-supported agency and their invisibility within the dominant culture. In doing so, the two books provide young readers with insights into southern regions and histories that center alternatives to common representations of Southern history that neglect or simply deny the South’s demographic diversity.

In the final paper, Carl F. Miller studies the American South’s contemporary prestige and identity in the context of children’s book awards. In considering specific recent texts about the Southern United States that have won children’s book awards—and, just as revealingly, a number which have not won—he highlights the critical and popular codification of regional identity and Southern history. Much as the late June Cummins emphasized the “identity-based” nature of children’s book awards, it is revealing to map the ways the South itself offers an identity-based subject for such awards. From the Newbery and Caldecott Medals to children’s choice awards to specific regional awards (such as the little-known Southern Book Prize), such prizing has increasingly recognized marginalized Southern voices while also problematically reinforcing a particular geographic hegemony.