I Die Daily Police Brutality, Black Bodies, and the Force of Children’s Literature

<p>Contributions by Michelle Ann Abate, Samira Abdur-Rahman, Cara Byrne, Katharine Capshaw, Gabrielle Atwood Halko, Michelle S. Hite, Sarah E. Jackson, Dianne Johnson-Feelings, Renée Latchman, Michelle H. Martin, Ashley Hope Pérez, Connie Porter, Karen Sands-O’Connor, and Althea L. Tait <br/> <br/> Positioned against the backdrop of state-sanctioned violence committed by law enforcement in twenty-first-century America,<i> I Die Daily: Police Brutality, Black Bodies, and the Force of Children</i><i>’</i><i>s Literature</i> is a difficult but necessary collection of essays that seeks to confront the treatment of Black bodies in children’s literature. Beginning with the tragic, brutal death of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, contributors in <i>I Die Daily </i>explore the biases at work in children<i>’</i>s stories dealing with race and power dynamics and the successes and shortcomings of scholars in the way of addressing these power dynamics. <br/> <br/> <i>I Die Daily </i>names those killed by police brutality—Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, Aiyana Stanley Jones, Trayvon Martin, and George Floyd—to forever inscribe their histories into the social record. In connecting the fate of a young Black boy on a hot, Mississippi-summer afternoon to the long list of Black Americans killed by the police, <i>I Die Daily</i> asks readers to reckon with the relationship between America<i>’</i>s violent racial history and children’s literature and envisions new, hopeful paths forward.</p>