South Florida public schools expand curricula to encompass world literature

In an effort to include more diverse voices, many Florida public high school teachers now assign more works by contemporary writers from around the world, including bestsellers such as The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini from Afghanistan and the 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Dominican-born Junot Diaz.

While the classics of English and American literature--Shakespeare, Milton, Hawthorne, and so on--still receive their due, more teachers are giving attention to other, often overlooked voices on this vast planet.

Patricia Mazzei of the Miami Herald writes:

[A] 1993 national study, the most recent survey of its kind, found that the most frequently taught works in high schools in 1988 were remarkably similar to those taught in 1963.

Newer novels that make it into the classroom tend to be coming-of-age stories and works from other cultures, Applebee said. There has also been a notable influx of books by women and minority writers, particularly in literary anthologies.

Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou are widely read, as are Alice Walker's The Color Purple, Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street, and novels by Amy Tan, who told the story of a Chinese family's immigrant experience in The Joy Luck Club and also wrote The Bonesetter's Daughter.