The organisation
Our story
“Literacy improves lives.” That sentence opened L4LL's own about page, and everything the group built followed from it.
Latinas for Latino Lit was created in December 2012 by four Latina bloggers — Viviana Hurtado (The Wise Latina Club), Lisa Quiñones-Fontanez (AutismWonderland), Carla Molina Martins (All of Me Now) and Monica Olivera (MommyMaestra, Latin Baby Book Club) — in response to the New York Times article “For Young Latino Readers, an Image Is Missing.”
Their stated goal was to “rally the cry of Latinos everywhere who want to fill their bookshelves with books representative of their diverse culture and experience,” and to see more Latino authors and illustrators published. The method was to talk to the Latino community directly and to give publishers a practical route to that market.
By 2014 the organisation described itself as a woman- and minority-owned education and literacy organisation run by co-founders Viviana Hurtado, Ph.D. and Monica Olivera, with a mission to raise literacy rates through “pedagogically sound, culturally relevant content.” A nonprofit branch, Friends of Latinas for Latino Lit, existed to keep the programmes free.
What they built
- The Latino Children's Summer Reading Program — the first nationwide online summer reading programme for Hispanic families, piloted 2013.
- The Día Blog Hop — a month of Latino authors and illustrators posting across Latina blogs each April.
- Hispanic Heritage Month: Festival of Books — reading lists and classroom kits, 15 September to 15 October.
- Read for the Holidays — December recommendations and the annual Remarkable Latino Children's Literature list.
- The Living List of Latino Authors and Illustrators.