About

Hello, fellow readers!

Hi. I’m Mel.

I started Equal Opportunity Reader in early 2020 to focus on diverse books, diverse writers, and diverse readers. That means writers and books for and about those of us who are racially diverse, culturally diverse, gender diverse, LGBTQIA+, poor, neurodivergent, disabled, historically under-represented, any combinations of the above, or otherwise historically misrepresented, marginalized, oppressed and silenced people. By no means am I saying that there are no good books by white male cis-straight neurotypical Western writers. I occasionally read and review a cheesy bestseller by a really white dude with no shame or explanation. I’m just saying that good books come from and are about everyone, so let’s stop faking like that’s not the case and expand our literary minds and cultural perspectives. That’s all.

Aside from my commitment to normal human diversity in my reading, a firm belief that literacy is for everyone, and a lack of an internalized genre hierarchy of books(romance, science, and philosophy all exist on the same planet), I’m also a writer. You can find a sci-fi short I wrote on the web magazine Midnight and Indigo here. You can find another in the magazine khoreo here. I wrote about my mother here. I wrote about the strange and confusing place I live now here. I also wrote an essay about being Black in Asia in the book of the same name, which you can find here.

I’m available as a speaker, writer and panelist on issues of diversity in literature, particularly moving towards normalization of diversity and difference in the arts. Contact me at equalopportunityreaders AT gmail DOT com