Jennifer Miller is lecturer of English at the University of Texas at Arlington. She researches LGBTQ+ children's picture books, digital culture, and subcultures.
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Recommended for all academic shelves serving adolescent literature scholars.--Jen McConnel "School Library Journal" Jennifer Miller combines deft, close reading with a kind of macroanalysis, identifying shifting trends and persistent tropes across the corpus. Miller also thinks about the networks of production, circulation, and consumption. Because hers is the most comprehensive treatment yet, it is also the most nuanced and persuasive. Practicing what she calls 'critical optimism, ' Miller holds that too often we underappreciate or dismiss as 'homonormative' earlier materials that did important work in their moment. I learned so much reading this book--about early queer picture book publishing initiatives, for instance, and about the depiction of families and communities, tomboys and sissies/pink boys, and trans and nonbinary kids. Picture book nonfiction is also part of Miller's story. Especially moving is Miller's insistence that LGBTQ+ picture books are, at heart, acts of queer love and worldmaking. A vital (even urgent) book for the field and beyond.--Kenneth Kidd, professor of English at University of Florida Jennifer Miller's The Transformative Potential of LGBTQ+Children's Picture Books is an important contribution to the growing scholarship on LGBTQ+children's literature and provides a critical, loving portrait of the development of LGBTQ+picture books specifically. '--Emily S. Meixner "Journal of LGBT Youth"