These are the questions at the heart of the newly published volume Names, Naming, Diversity, and Identity in Youth Literature, edited by I. M. Nick and published by Bloomsbury Academic in the series Names and Naming in the Social Sciences and Humanities. The Canadian edition lists the hardback as published on 25 June 2026; the volume has 168 pages, fifteen tables, and seven chapters. Nick is President of the Germanic Society for Forensic Linguistics, Editor-in-Chief of NAMES: A Journal of Onomastics, and a former President of the American Name Society.
Bloomsbury: Names, Naming, Diversity, and Identity in Youth Literature
The publisher places the collection in a particularly contemporary context. Youth literature has become increasingly attentive to ethnic, racial, linguistic, cultural, religious and other forms of diversity, while books dealing positively with difference and group belonging have simultaneously become objects of public controversy and restriction. The volume asks what names and acts of naming contribute to these representations. Its primary geographical emphasis is Anglo-American, something the publisher itself acknowledges, but the conceptual range extends from invented fantasy worlds to migration, Asian American and Latinx experience, multicultural picturebooks and gender diversity.
Because the volume is so new, what follows is best understood as an introduction rather than a conventional book review. For this presentation, I have compared Bloomsbury’s table of contents and book preview with publicly available research by the contributors and with abstracts from the 2026 meeting of the American Name Society. That additional material makes it possible to say considerably more about several chapters than their titles alone would reveal. Three of the book’s contributions, by Sharon N. Obasi, Susan J. Behrens, and Edcel Javier Cintrón-Gonzalez with Adriana De Persia Colón, were in fact presented in closely related form during the ANS session “Diversity in Youth Literature” on 21 February 2026.
From character names to entire imagined cultures
1. Michael Adams — Onomasticon Fantasticum: Names and Cultural Diversity in Fantasy for Young Readers
The opening chapter, by Michael Adams of Indiana University Bloomington, begins with an important distinction. In books for very young children, names frequently work primarily at the level of character: readers encounter and identify with Peter, Alexander, and other individual protagonists. As narrative worlds become more complex, however, names acquire a broader function. They help readers build and navigate fictional worlds. In fantasy, Adams argues, naming becomes especially important because names serve as landmarks in geographical, social and cultural space.
Adams compares three major fantasy traditions: J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels, and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. His argument is not that all fantasy naming works in the same way. Tolkien’s philological construction of languages makes names part of the deep cultural architecture of Middle-earth; Rowling’s names, in Adams’s reading, tend more often to characterize individuals; Pullman raises more philosophical questions about naming, reference and ontology.
Tolkien provides the clearest demonstration of what literary onomastics can contribute. Elves, dwarves, hobbits and different human populations possess distinctive languages and naming systems. Aragorn, Strider and Elessar, for example, are not merely three labels for the same person: each locates that person differently within a cultural relationship. Adams treats such multiple naming as a way of making cultural difference perceptible to the reader.
It is an excellent choice for the opening chapter because it establishes one of the collection’s central principles: a literary name is not simply decorative vocabulary. It can be part of narrative structure itself.
When migration reaches the personal name
2. Sharon N. Obasi — Whispering Names, Shouting Identities: The Power of Naming in Youth Literature About Immigrants and Immigration
Sharon N. Obasi of the University of Nebraska at Kearney moves from invented worlds to one of the most tangible naming experiences in real life: migration.
Her ANS abstract provides a useful guide to the chapter’s concerns. Personal names, Obasi argues, transmit cultural heritage, family lineage and historical memory. Migration can transform them into sites of negotiation. A migrant may repeatedly encounter mispronunciation or misspelling, feel pressure to adopt a name that is easier for the dominant society, or discover that different transliterations have consequences in official documentation. For asylum seekers, inconsistent name forms can even create legal difficulties.
Youth literature can make these apparently small linguistic experiences visible. Retaining a name, altering it, accepting another form or resisting one can dramatize the larger tension between adaptation and cultural continuity. Obasi’s abstract describes names in the texts she studies as resources for resistance, resilience and transformation.
The chapter therefore raises an important question for literary onomastics: when a fictional immigrant child’s name is made “easier” for others, who is actually being asked to adapt—the name bearer or the surrounding society?
Asian American naming: pride or assimilation?
3. Jung Kim and Sohyun An — Asian American Names in Children’s Literature: Opportunities for Cultural Pride or Promoting Cultural Assimilation?
The question becomes even more explicit in the chapter by Jung Kim of Lewis University and Sohyun An of Kennesaw State University.
The title deliberately presents two possibilities. Can children’s literature use Asian American names to strengthen cultural pride and make minority identities visible? Or can narratives about supposedly “difficult” names unintentionally reproduce the assumption that the child must accommodate the dominant English-speaking environment?
The book preview shows that this is not merely an impressionistic discussion. The chapter contains a table systematically identifying the titles, authors, publishers, publication years and racial/ethnic backgrounds of the principal characters in the corpus examined.
The authors’ backgrounds make this investigation particularly interesting. Jung Kim’s scholarship brings together literacy, race, equity and Asian American children’s and young-adult literature; Sohyun An’s research focuses on K–12 Asian American studies, curriculum and anti-racist social-studies education.
Their chapter belongs to a growing body of research showing that names in Asian American childhood contexts are far from trivial. Earlier scholarship has examined Korean American children negotiating names across home, school and peer environments, while more recent work has connected Asian American naming practices explicitly with experiences of racialization. The new chapter carries that discussion into literary representation.
The question in its title is therefore particularly well chosen. Representation alone does not guarantee inclusion. A book can prominently feature a Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese or other Asian name while still constructing the surrounding culture as the norm to which that name must eventually adjust.
Naming as a resource when other forms of power disappear
4. Susan J. Behrens — Support, Hope, and Strength Through Naming in Fiction for Young Readers: Young Protagonists Harnessing Names to Survive Powerlessness
Susan J. Behrens of Marymount Manhattan College turns to young characters facing poverty, exploitation and other forms of profound social powerlessness.
Her ANS abstract identifies three recurring onomastic strategies. First, related or parallel names can create bonds between characters, providing young protagonists with networks of support. Second, protagonists may rename themselves or adopt monikers that permit them to imagine another identity and another future. Third, characters may reject false or oppressive labels and insist on the names that express their authentic selves.
Behrens has developed closely related arguments in the 2025 article “Naming to Survive in the Face of Powerlessness: Four Case Studies from Fiction for Young Readers,” published in NAMES. There she studies contemporary YA protagonists confronting mental-health crises, HIV/AIDS, the trauma of school shootings and the marginalization of Roma youth, arguing that attention to “true” names can become a literary model for self-advocacy and agency.
That makes this chapter particularly significant for literary onomastics. It moves beyond asking what a fictional name means etymologically and asks what a character can actually do with a name.
A name can create a relationship. A nickname can offer temporary escape. An imposed label can diminish somebody. Reclaiming a name can reverse that relationship of power.
Picturebooks and the first lesson in respecting a name
5. Sally Brown and Nahiris Lugo Munoz — Who Am I? The Storied Worlds of Naming Practices and Identity in Multicultural Children’s Picturebooks
The chapter by Sally Brown and Nahiris Lugo Munoz of Georgia Southern University shifts attention to picturebooks and therefore to some of the youngest readers represented in the collection.
The preview suggests a particularly methodical study. The authors identify selected “naming picturebooks” together with the cultural backgrounds of their authors and illustrators; they develop a Names and Naming Practices Picturebook Evaluation Tool intended to assess accuracy and authenticity; and their analysis includes explicit themes and coding categories.
A newly published companion study helps illuminate why this matters. In “More Than a Name: Identity, Culture, and Representation in Children’s Picturebooks,” Sally Brown, Yáng Wáng and Nahiris Lugo Munoz combine interviews with seven culturally diverse educators with analysis of multicultural picturebooks. They find that names and name stories possess considerable emotional and cultural significance, while mispronunciation and alteration can negatively affect children’s experiences. The authors also discuss books such as Becoming Vanessa and Say My Name as resources for identity affirmation and classroom empathy.
This is an especially productive direction for onomastics. A picturebook about a name does not simply tell children that cultural difference exists. It can model how one responds to another person’s name: whether one listens, learns its pronunciation, asks about its history, or instead tries to replace it with something more familiar.
In that sense, naming literature can provide some of a child’s earliest lessons about linguistic respect.
“My name is not Ivy-Liz”
6. Edcel Javier Cintrón-Gonzalez and Adriana De Persia Colón — My Name Is Not “Ivy-Liz,” It’s “Iveliz”: Naming Practices and Negotiations of Space and Identity in Latinx Youth Literature
The title of the chapter by Edcel Javier Cintrón-Gonzalez of Illinois State University and Adriana De Persia Colón of the University of Cambridge contains its argument in miniature.
Iveliz is not Ivy-Liz.
A seemingly minor act of pronunciation becomes a contest over who has the authority to determine what another person is called.
Fortunately, an ANS abstract by the same authors identifies two of the literary works at the center of their research. In Elizabeth Acevedo’s With the Fire on High, they examine the naming of Emoni, a teenage mother negotiating her future, against histories of erasure and assimilation. In Andrea Beatriz Arango’s verse novel Iveliz Explains It All, the protagonist repeatedly insists on the pronunciation and significance of names rather than making them more “palatable” to the dominant culture.
The authors connect naming with the negotiation of space. That formulation is particularly insightful. Correcting somebody who changes Iveliz into Ivy-Liz is not only a phonetic correction. It is a claim to social space: I do not need to linguistically reshape myself in order to be admitted here.
The chapter therefore shows how literary naming can express assimilation and resistance without requiring lengthy political explanation. A few syllables can carry the whole conflict.
Toward a “rainbow onomastics”
7. I. M. Nick — Rainbow Onomastics: Literary Strategies for Naming Characters in Children’s Books for and About Gender Diversity
Editor I. M. Nick closes the volume by examining naming and gender diversity in children’s literature.
The publicly accessible material does not provide enough of the chapter itself to reconstruct its individual literary analyses responsibly, so some caution is necessary here. What can be established is revealing nonetheless. The book preview shows that the chapter includes a figure presenting registered US violent-crime rates between 2017 and 2021 according to gender identity and sexuality. In other words, Nick does not treat the naming of gender-diverse characters as a purely stylistic question; literary naming is placed against a broader social context in which identity labels and personal identities can have serious real-world consequences.
The chapter also follows logically from Nick’s previous work. In the 2024 volume Names, Naming, and the Law, Nick and Sharon N. Obasi co-authored a chapter on laws and policies regulating personal names and transgender and gender-diverse identities in the United States and Canada. That study examined the relationship between chosen names, gender identity and official documentation.
Rainbow Onomastics brings related questions into literature for younger audiences. How do authors create names for gender-diverse characters? How does renaming communicate identity? What happens when the name used by the self conflicts with the name used by others? And how can literature represent such choices without reducing a character to a category?
Those questions make the final chapter a logical endpoint for the collection: naming is presented not only as something society does to individuals, but something individuals can use to articulate who they are.
Seven chapters, but one larger argument
Seen together, the chapters create a striking progression.
Michael Adams begins with the invented names of imaginary cultures. Sharon Obasi moves into the instability of immigrant names. Jung Kim and Sohyun An ask whether Asian American names in children’s literature foster cultural pride or assimilation. Susan Behrens examines naming as a resource for young people facing powerlessness. Sally Brown and Nahiris Lugo Munoz bring the discussion into multicultural picturebooks and early education. Cintrón-Gonzalez and De Persia Colón show pronunciation itself becoming a negotiation of Latinx identity. Finally, I. M. Nick examines names used to represent gender-diverse childhoods and identities. The complete seven-chapter structure is confirmed by Bloomsbury’s table of contents.
What holds these apparently different topics together is a shift in the basic question of literary onomastics.
Instead of asking only:
Why did the author choose this name?
the volume repeatedly encourages us to ask:
Who has the right to name? Who has the right to change a name? Who must learn whose pronunciation? What social information does a name make visible? What disappears when it is altered? And what new identity becomes possible when someone names themselves?
That is perhaps the book’s strongest contribution.
A timely expansion of literary onomastics
Literary onomastics has traditionally been particularly strong at uncovering etymology, symbolism, sound associations, intertextual references and authorial wordplay. Names, Naming, Diversity, and Identity in Youth Literature does not abandon any of those concerns. Instead, it adds a strongly socio-onomastic dimension.
Names move between texts and society.
Tolkien’s multiple names encode encounters between invented cultures. An immigrant child’s name carries a language across a border. An Asian American protagonist’s name can expose assumptions about assimilation. A teenager can discard a damaging label. A teacher can either learn a child’s name or continually distort it. Iveliz can refuse to become Ivy-Liz. A gender-diverse character can claim a name that expresses an identity more accurately than the one assigned by others.
Bloomsbury’s endorsements accordingly emphasize the collection’s treatment of belonging, resistance and empowerment, as well as the unusually broad movement from fantasy and picturebooks to novels and verse.
There is one limitation worth noting even in an introductory presentation. Despite the broad title, the publisher describes the volume itself as primarily Anglo-American in geographical focus. That leaves considerable room for future comparative work: naming and youth literature in Africa, Asia, continental Europe, the Middle East, Latin America beyond US Latinx writing, and Indigenous literary traditions could eventually expand this conversation considerably.
But as a starting point, this compact seven-chapter collection demonstrates convincingly just how much can happen in the space occupied by a personal name.
Why this book matters to onomasticians
Perhaps the most important achievement of Names, Naming, Diversity, and Identity in Youth Literature is that it takes young readers seriously.
Children encounter onomastic diversity long before they know the word onomastics. They notice that some classmates’ names are repeatedly mispronounced. They learn that grandparents use one form of a name and teachers another. They discover nicknames, pseudonyms, translated names and chosen names. Through fantasy they learn that another people may possess a completely different naming system. Through migration stories they encounter names that cross languages and borders.
Youth literature is therefore one of the earliest places in which people learn what names can mean socially.
And that makes the study of names in such literature anything but marginal.
A child reading about Iveliz insisting on Iveliz, a migrant protagonist retaining a heritage name, or Aragorn being known differently across several cultures is also learning something about the relationship between language, identity and other people.
That is where this new volume is particularly successful conceptually. It demonstrates that names in youth literature can operate simultaneously as linguistic forms, literary devices, cultural inheritances, social classifications and acts of self-definition.
In other words, the question is no longer merely What is in a name?
For young readers, the more interesting question may be:
What can a name do?
Bibliographical information
Nick, I. M. (ed.). 2026. Names, Naming, Diversity, and Identity in Youth Literature. Names and Naming in the Social Sciences and Humanities. Bloomsbury Academic. 168 pp. ISBN 978-1-6669-7586-4. The Canadian hardback edition is dated 25 June 2026.
Book information and ordering at Bloomsbury
Susan J. Behrens, “Naming to Survive in the Face of Powerlessness” in NAMES
