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The second floor is closed for renovation until summer.

Meet the Author: Dahlia Richards

Wednesday, February 19, 2020
5:30 pm - 6:30 pm
Youth Department

Hear selected readings by author Dahlia Richards. Stay around after to try tasty samples from a local Jamaican restaurant and get your book signed. Drop-in event for kids of all ages.

Amoya's Big Move tells the story of a young girl on the day she and her family give away the last of their belongings and prepare to leave their home country of Jamaica for Chicago. The little things, such as her favorite ice cream, pop up in her memory as she realizes that this treat might not be available where she is going. This is the perfect story for families who have left their home countries and those who want to learn more about this experience.

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The second floor is closed for renovation until summer. Wednesday, February 19, 20205:30 pm - 6:30 pmYouth Department Hear selected readings by author Dahlia Richards. Stay around after to try tasty samples from a local Jamaican restaurant and get your book signed. Drop-in event for kids of all ages.

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Valley author and former Northampton poet laureate Lesléa Newman has won a National Jewish Book Award for children's literature for her 2019 book "Gittel's Journey: An Ellis Island Story," a tale that's based on some real-life stories Newman heard from family and friends as she was growing up (the book is illustrated by Amy June Bates).

That's not all: "Gittel's Journey" has garnered Newman a Silver Medal from the 2020 Sydney Taylor Book Awards, and she has also won a Sydney Taylor Body of Work Award. The Sydney Awards recognize books for children and teens that exemplify high literary standards while authentically portraying the Jewish experience.

In an email, Newman said she didn't know if she'd ever been nominated for a National Jewish Book Award before and was thrilled to win. "I have to admit, I cried when I heard the news. It's a huge honor to be on the roster along with so many legendary past winners, many of whom I've been reading all my life."

That list, she noted, includes not only people such as Bernard Malamud, Isaac Bashevitz Singer, and Cynthia Ozick but Valley writers like Barbara Diamond Goldin, Richard Michelson, Jane Yolen, Ilan Stavans, and "the late great Mordicai Gerstein."

In a statement, she also said she got a phone call about the Sydney Award recently as she was watching the Screen Actors Guild Awards on TV, where Robert De Niro was giving a thank-you speech after being winning a lifetime achievement award.

"I was half-listening and half-fantasizing about the people I would thank if I ever won such an award," she said. "I thought I must be dreaming."

In Newman's book, 9-year-old Gittel, who lives in an Eastern Europe shtetl in the early 1900s, is supposed to go with her mother to America, where they'll live with her mother's cousin, Mendel. But as they're about to board the ship to cross the Atlantic Ocean, her mother is denied passage because of an eye infection.

Gittel's mother insists her daughter go to America by herself: "Home is not safe for us ... This is God's plan. God will take care of you." She gives Gittel two Shabbat​​​ (Sabbath) candlesticks, as well as a piece of paper with Mendel's address in New York City, telling her not to lose the paper. Through a sad and lonely trip aboard the big liner, Gittel holds tightly to the paper for safekeeping.

But at Ellis Island in New York, she discovers the ink on the paper has become hopelessly smeared, most of it rubbing off on her hand. Gittel is terrified - until a friendly translator speaks to her in Yiddish and thinks of an ingenious way to connect Gittel to Mendel.

Newman said the story is based on two real-life experiences she heard about - from her godmother's mother, Sadie Gringrass, and her maternal grandmother, Ruth Levin - that "are embedded in my bones.... I was nurtured by them just as surely as I was nurtured by the matzo ball soup my family ate on Jewish holidays.... I fused these two stories together in my mind, as I wanted to show how brave the children were who came here alone (many children traveled unaccompanied)."
Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com.

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Local poet wins Jewish children's book award: Lesléa Newman's "Gittel's Journey: An Ellis Island Story" is about an immigrant uniting with family members

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Valley author and former Northampton poet laureate Lesléa Newman has won a National Jewish Book Award for children's literature for her 2019 book "Gittel's Journey: An Ellis Island Story," a tale that's based on some real-life stories Newman heard from family and friends as she was growing up (the book is illustrated by Amy June Bates).

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Poetry slam gives young people the confidence to express themselves

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Title: I Am the Night Sky & Other Reflections by Muslim American Youth
Authors: Next Wave Muslim Initiative Writers*
Publisher: Shout Mouse Press
Pages: 174
Availability: On shelves now
Review copy: Final copy provided by publisher

Summary: During an era characterized by both hijabi fashion models and enduring post-9/11 stereotypes, ten Muslim American teenagers came together to explore what it means to be young and Muslim in America today. These teens represent the tremendous diversity within the American Muslim community, and their book, like them, contains multitudes. Bilal writes about being a Muslim musician. Imaan imagines a dystopian Underground. Samaa creates her own cartoon Kabob Squad. Ayah responds to online hate. Through poems, essays, artwork, and stories, these young people aim to show their true selves, to build connection, and to create more inclusive and welcoming communities for all.

Review: The cover image is stunning and really helps convey the purpose of the whole collection. Collage is used throughout and is perfect for this project since the book shares many facets of the contributors' identities. The art pieces told their own story while also supporting the text. We are all so many things at the same time and if we focus on any one piece, we miss so much of each other.

This work was an opportunity for ten young Muslim writers to share who they are and not just accept how other people have defined them. The title comes from the first piece, written by Salihah Aakil, that explores the night. "I decided that every time they likened this dark to pain, fear, or evil, I would write a poem likening it to love, joy, and life." Yes, the negative stereotypes and beliefs may be out there, but Aakil refuses to get stuck on those. The authors do not ignore the hateful and offensive comments and actions of some people, but chose to answer these with strength and pride in themselves. In "Pride and Sticky Notes," Ayah Noor shares a story of answering horrifying comments on a YouTube video with affirming actions. Instead of railing against the haters, opportunities are offered for friends and family to think about and share the things they find positive about being Muslim. Throughout, the authors are having the last word about themselves and their community.

With so many contributors, there were bound to be many similarities, but also many differences. Some pieces focused specifically on identity, while others are about interests such as music or how friendships can change over time. No matter the theme or focus, there is a common thread running through the texts and art - as Layla Rasheed writes,

"...I remember what I love
about being Muslim, like
that we welcome everyone,
that we are a community,
and that we all celebrate
Together."
That is what this collection seems to be doing. They are welcoming everyone to come closer, to connect, and be in conversation. They're inviting people to get to know them. And, much of this work is a celebration of being Muslim. They remind themselves and share with others the many blessings and benefits they experience as a part of their faith.

Recommendation: Get it soon. For teens or other readers of YA, this is a quick read that will speak to many. It would be difficult to ignore or forget these voices. This book is a wonderful opportunity to see many different ways American Muslim teens are living out their faith. It would also be an excellent mentor text in writing classrooms or writing groups.

*Samaa Eldadah, Noor Saleem, Imaan Shanavas, Bilal Saleem, Salihah Aakil, Leyla Rasheed, Ruqayyah Aakil, Fatima Rafie, Iman Ilias, and Ayah Noor with a foreward by Hena Khan and afterward by Mona Eldadah

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I Am the Night Sky & Other Reflections by Muslim American Youth

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Title: I Am the Night Sky & Other Reflections by Muslim American Youth Authors: Next Wave Muslim Initiative Writers* Publisher: Shout Mouse Press Pages: 174 Availability: On shelves now Review copy: Final copy provided by publisher Summary: During an era characterized by both hijabi fashion models and enduring post-9/11 stereotypes, ten Muslim American teenagers came together to explore what it means to be young and Muslim in America today.

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Coming Together 2020 Supplemental Texts - Resources for Selectors

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In striving to enrich the lives of all readers, TeachingBooks supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

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Newbury Honor Book
Written by Jacqueline Woodson

Illustrated by Hudson Talbott

Soonie's great-grandma was just seven years old when she was sold to a big plantation without her ma and pa, and with only some fabric and needles to call her own. She pieced together bright patches of cloth with names like North Star and Crossroads, patches with secret meanings made into quilts called Show Ways -- maps for slaves to follow to freedom. When she grew up and had a little girl, she passed on this knowledge. And generations later, Soonie -- who was born free -- taught her own daughter how to sew beautiful quilts to be sold at market and how to read the quilt code.

From slavery to freedom, through segregation, freedom marches and the fight for literacy, the tradition they called Show Way has been passed down by the women in Jacqueline Woodson's family as a way to remember the past and celebrate the possibilities of the future. Beautifully rendered in Hudson Talbott's luminous art, this moving, lyrical account pays tribute to women whose strength and knowledge illuminate their daughters' lives.

In Stores Now Browse the Book Available as: Signed Copy

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Newbury Honor Book Written by Jacqueline Woodson Illustrated by Hudson Talbott Soonie's great-grandma was just seven years old when she was sold to a big plantation without her ma and pa, and with only some fabric and needles to call her own.

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Below is an edited transcript from Reading Rockets' interview with Carole Boston Weatherford. The transcript is divided into the following clips:

The basics

My name is Jacqueline Woodson, and I've known I wanted to be a writer since I was seven years old. I've written 29 books now, everything from picture books to middle grade to young adult, fiction. I write a lot of books across genres because I get bored just writing one thing.

I'm usually working on more than one book at a time, if I get bored with one, I go to the other. If I get bored with that, I go to the next. Most of my writing is realistic fiction except for Show Way which is a history of my family from my great-great grandma to the present.

But most of them are written about people who seem like they could be in the world. I get my ideas from everywhere from the newspaper, from things I see on the street, from other books I read, from talking to my friends, from talking to my family. I just think that ideas are in the air.

It starts with a character

Usually when I start to write a book, the first thing I have in my head is the character. I have the character, and the character's kind of formed. I don't know what they're gonna do, I don't know what they're gonna say, I don't know what their story is, but I just start writing.

I never outline. I never know where it's going. I just start writing and see where it takes me. Then I get to a point where I have to kind of figure it out. In the case of Hush which is a story of a girl and her family who become part of the witness protection program, I didn't know anything about the witness protection program.

When I realized that they were going to be a part of it, I had to start researching it. I have a couple of journalist friends. My friend Linda works for the New York Times, I asked her to gather as much information about it as she could, and she gathered 400 pages.

With Miracle's Boys which is about three brothers who are raising themselves after their parents die. I didn't know a lot about what it would mean for a young kid to raise his younger siblings, what it meant in terms of the socioeconomics of it, what it meant in terms of the legal issues surrounding it, what it meant in terms of education and the law.

I know law is the legal issue. I just had to kind of read about if a 21-year-old was raising his kids, who was be involved from the state? Who would be involved at the local level? And how would this all get monitored? Also, I didn't know a lot about diabetes.

I had to research that. If someone were to die from freezing, what would that look like? Those are the kind of things I read. I'll interrupt the writing and just spend some time researching it. A lot of it is done on the Internet.

Feathers/Deaf culture

When I was writing Feathers, I had studied sign language for many years, but there were signs that I couldn't remember, and I would look some of them up, and then I would have to sit and try to figure out how do I write that this is the sign for death, a finger moving from the ear to the mouth.

How do I write that this is the sign for hunger, a hand pulling itself down the belly. It's this kind of creative process mixed with the research and back to the creative, but all along the creative side of my brain is working to figure out how to put it on the page.

It's hard because I hadn't realized when I wrote Feathers that there weren't a lot of books about deaf culture. There had never been a book about an African American kid who was deaf. I just didn't know that, but I knew that I was writing realistic fiction, and I was writing about different cultures, and there are so many cultures in the world.

There is mine, the different cultures I come from. There're the cultures that I've found. There's the cultures that aren't even acknowledged as cultures. I thought it's amazing to have grown up and become this age and not ever have read a book about the deaf community.

I decided to make Sean deaf because Feathers is a book about the different ways people have hope in the world or search for hope in the world. I wanted Sean's journey in there, the journey of being deaf in a hearing family, and what does that mean.

I think it's something we don't think about a lot. I think we think of deafness as other. We think of it as something that is not a culture but, too often, people think of it as a handicap. Deaf should be a capital D just like African-American culture.

I wanted to put on the page a kid who had his culture, who had the deaf community and his world and a supportive family that wasn't saying be like us, but saying you're a gift to us, and we wanna move into your world.

Also his longing, because they all had longings, and his longing was to be a part of both worlds. He never says I want to be a hearing person. He says I wanna be a deaf person who can exist in both worlds the way you as a hearing person exist in my world.

It was important for me in talking about the ways people have hope and the ways people move through the world and showing this world through this group of young people. When I first started writing it, it was actually called The Jesus Boy. And Jesus Boy was the main character.

As the story started unfolding I thought, this is not simply about him but about this whole world of kids and their strength and their weaknesses and their journeys.

Family history

Show Way begins when Soonie's great-grandma was seven, and she was stolen from Virginia and sent to a plantation in South Carolina without her mom or pop.

I knew about my grandmother Soonie, and I knew about her grandmother, although I didn't know her name. When my grandmother was getting sick, my family would never tell me stories. They would talk to each other, well you remember when Soonie blah, blah, blah, or Soonie was so mean.

I caught snippets all my life, and I knew this family history sort of, but when my grandmother was getting older and had no great-grandchildren and I had been saying I was going to have a baby forever and I hadn't yet. She was getting older and she didn't think she would get any great-grandbabies, she said if you ever do have one, make sure you tell her about Soonie and how those blankets were made, and make sure Aunt Lucinda gives you one of the quilts and I had none of this information. I told her that one day when I had a baby I would like to give it one of the names of my family.

Just tell me everybody's names - she had 12 brothers and sisters. She started telling me the names which were like Birdie and I'm thinking, my child is not going to be named any of these names. But she told me more and more stories.

She died four months before I got pregnant with Toshi. I knew I wanted to tell the story of the maternal line of the family, so I started writing Show Way and I ended up going back to South Carolina to talk to my aunt who died soon after and to talk to my cousins, to piece together the history of the Underground Railroad and what part the Scotts played in it. That's how I got to the story and I also wanted to write about how I'm not here accidentally, I'm not sitting here and talking about my writing.

Bearing witness

I'm not here as a mom, I'm not here as an activist and all the things that I try to do because I just decided to do it one day, I'm here because my mother was part of the Civil Rights movement out here because my grandmother was a teacher. I'm here because my great-great-grandparents were a part of the Underground Railroad.

I'm here because of the quilts, I'm here because of the language. I'm here because of the food and my daughter is too. I wanted to keep that strand going and acknowledge the people that came before me. I had no idea that there was controversy regarding the fact that folks were using the Underground Railroad.

I remember the first time I heard it and I thought, well my grandmother wasn't lying. This woman said, there's no written documentation. The history of African-Americans is oral history. We were not allowed to learn to read and write.

Nobody was going to go up in the big house and say, master, can you write down this story about how we're escaping using these quilts and the Underground Railroad? I mean it was so ridiculous to me on so many levels, so a lot of our history, we only had names and birth dates and stuff written in Bibles.

I think it was the early 1900s, there was some sense of this stuff that we were able to access. One of the controversies was the black square in the middle of one of the quilt pieces because it was black and they said there was no black at that time. It turned out it was indigo.

I was so stunned because I thought, how dare you doubt my history, how dare you call my grandma a liar and the people who came before her. If that's the case, then how are we here? I think there is the part of my people who wanted to help that slave have the ability to get free.

There's a lot more documentation now. It's really interesting because it happened to me twice, it happened and I haven't written about the second time yet, but the second time is the Woodson side. I don't know if you know the Woodson side, but that's Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson.

The Woodson line comes out of that and we always knew that and first as an adult, they were saying Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson were never together. Well they were together but they didn't have children, yeah well they had children, but Woodson blended children.

They finally did DNA testing and they realized, oops, yes, these are the descendants and I think in terms of being a writer and thinking about our history and how important it is to write stuff down. Like a lot of the stuff obviously that I write, is realistic fiction.

I am thinking more and more about writing more non-fiction just to bear witness and document what I know, what I've experienced and to not lose these strands and Show Way is a line, that slave was killed running off to the North side of the War a month before he got to meet his baby girl, a girl child who was born free that same year, 1863.

History went and lost her name, years later Soonie came. That was Soonie's mother and we don't have any documentation of her name. I thought as I was writing Show Way that I'd make up a name for her, and then I thought no, I think this needs to be written down that we did lose some of our history on this journey.

Reaching reluctant readers

I think the thing about kids who are reluctant to pick up books, to read, I think it's two-fold. I was a slow reader. I struggled as a reader, and I think part of it was I didn't care about the books that people were giving me to read. Growing up in the 1970s and trying to find myself on the page was not happening.

There was Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman, Phyllis Wheatley, and everyone had been a slave, or escaped slavery, or learned to read during slavery, or, like, beat up someone during slavery. I was like, OK, this is the 1970s, have my people done anything since then?

Of course I didn't know how to ask those questions, I was in the 2nd grade. When finally I discovered John Steptoe's book Stevie, and it was a book where the people spoke like me, the people look like me, they probably lived in New York City, their apartment looked like my house.

It was eye-opening and it got me excited about reading. I went on from there to The Selfish Giant by Oscar Wilde and to Hans Christian Anderson's The Little Match Girl. I could begin to find parts of myself in books that seemingly had nothing to do with me.

I think we have to be respectful of the young people and say where are you in this book. I think that's the first thing to get them to see themselves in the literature. In Locomotion there are so many kids, black, white, Latino, Chicano, who live like Lonnie lives.

There are so many kids who don't but who know what it means to have been away from someone they loved, to know what it means to kind of have this story that you're eager to tell and no one has ever said to you you have a right to tell it as his teacher finally says to him.

Many kids have some kind of longing for home, for a certain kind of family, for food, whatever it is, and find themselves on the pages. I think the other thing if I think if you're a struggling reader, reading can be really overwhelming to you.

The idea of someone handing you a book that's 50 pages, that's 100 pages, that's 150 pages, it's like, where do you even begin? I always think it's important to give kids one paragraph, and let them expound about that paragraph.

Let that paragraph make them hungry for more. You give them small portions of things, and you let them grow to be hungry for more and more, and eventually they are.

Then there are the kids who might not be reading fiction, who are looking for non-fiction, who are looking for poetry, who are looking for spoken word, whose way of understanding their move toward comprehension is more oral, so a book on tape is probably the way to go or an excerpt from a book on tape.

On my website I have a video of Feathers, and it's a visual description of what the girl is talking about because some people need that. They need to see the picture in order to understand the words. I think that shift from picture books to non-illustrated books is fast.

All of a sudden you've comprehended something, and the pictures disappear, and whoa, I'm not supposed to be reading those anymore. I think it's important for middle graders, for high schoolers, to be able to go back to picture books and to learn how to read and understand and write.

When I'm stuck as a writer, I go right back to the picture books because the language is simple, deceptively simple, and it's immediate, and it's not overwhelming. I think so much of it is how we get overwhelmed.

Books begin a discussion

I think the thing I try to do as a writer is to bring worlds to the page. What happens with readers is they step inside those worlds, and they experience them in a way that they might not in their real life, and it gives them a chance to think about a bigger society and the greater good.

I mean, the constant question kids ask themselves is if it was me, what would I do? How would I engage with it? How would I treat the Jesus Boy? How would I treat Sean? Who would I be? Would I be Frannie or would I be someone else in this.

By the time they get to the end of the book, the asking of what happens next, what happens next? My question always to young people is, well, what do you think happens next or what would happen if it was your story or if you were one of these characters?

Young people get mad at me all the time and write, say, well, why did you decide that that kid had to die or that that kid had to move away or that Lonnie is not reunited with his sister?

I think it's a way of beginning a discussion. What's the happily ever after? How often does the happily ever after happen? In the real world, what have you experienced, or what do you see, or what do you know from your family?

I think in terms of getting young people to talk about their lives, and then to talk about the lives of others, and to talk about events in the world. It's such a social period from kindergarten to first grade in the picture book time.

They're learning how to get along. They're learning how to be in the world. They're learning how to be human in the world. When they get to be adolescents, they're learning who they are and their power in the world. They're learning about identity politics, who names them, how they name themselves.

A lot of what Hush, the book about the witness protection program, the big question is, when someone takes your name away, who do you become? If I woke up tomorrow and I couldn't be Jacqueline Woodson, what would that mean? How would I begin to re-identify myself?

I think a lot of that stuff is stuff kids are wondering and thinking about and talking about every day. For me to be able to sit down and create a world where they can exist in it. John Gardner who wrote a book called Becoming a Novelist talks about the fictive dream, the dream of fiction, and how when you're reading a book, you're in that dream.

That world is real to you, and you're a part of it. No one can tell you those people don't exist. I think that when I sit down and try to create that dream of fiction, first for myself and then for my readers, by the time I'm finished with a book, the readers really do believe and care about and love the characters.

When they love someone, they'll do whatever they can to kind of protect them and hold on to them and change the world for them. I think that's the big gift of fiction. It gives young people the courage to create change and to talk about change and to talk about different ways of being in the world, of themselves being the world, of adults being in the world, of what's wrong with the world, what's right with it.

Looking for themselves

I think there's always gonna be a gap for young people looking for images of themselves in the literature, and I think, partly, it's because everything's changing so quickly. I think at the same time, the essence of childhood doesn't change.

What young people want are stories that deal with issues of them trying to figure out who they are in the world. They feel isolated, they feel like they're the only ones like that, that their crazy family is the only crazy family like that, and that their longings are the only longings like that.

I think they're going to they find their way. I was talking about this yesterday, young people are hungry, and their brains are huge, and they are going to find their way the way we found our way. And I think there's going to be the literature that helps.

I think there's always a need for more stories. I get constant emails about why there isn't more literature targeted at gay/lesbian/transgender youth? Why isn't there more literature targeted at biracial families?

More literature that's targeted at single-parent families and parents. Of course, with all the foreclosures, what does it mean to suddenly lose your home and that whole issue of displacement which we weren't dealing with so much in the '70s and '80s and '90s as we are dealing with now.

How does the shaky ground keep them steady and how do they move with it? I think that there's always going to be a hunger. They're always going to have a hunger because that's what adolescence is, and there's always going to be a certain sorrow to their existence because they need to live in that world.

Reading beyond themselves

I know it sounds cliché, but I was in Kansas, I was in Topeka, and it was an all white school, and the teacher said to me, well, we don't get a lot of books about African Americans because we don't have African Americans in our class, in our school.

I thought, are your kids always going to be here? I said, when your kids leave here and they come to New York City, I don't want my child to be the first black person they ever encounter, because that's gonna be way too foreign for them, so why don't we start with the literature.

I think it's important that if your school system is not racially or economically or diverse in terms of gender, that the books still reflect that because the kids need to meet people unlike themselves and find a place in those people and in the story where they are, they share a common ground.

Because it's the beginning of the connection that literature's trying to form, that education is trying to form. We're trying to figure out how to connect with people and work together and make a better world. I mean that's what education is, is about understanding, it's about overcoming ignorance, it's about overcoming intolerance and you now bigotry.

The more people know about other people, the less doubt there will be. I think that we have to constantly publish books that talk about that. There's always going to be a need and I think now we have a lot of books and if you use a lot more books.

I think there is a need of getting more books out into the world and people realizing that this book about this gay white boy from California is very valid in my classroom because I don't want my kids to grow up to beat up this boy. That kind of stuff is so important.

We still have a lot of issues of censoring, censorship, of books getting challenged, of parents thinking they know what the book's about by reading the flap copy and deciding that's enough and not allow their kids to read the book. We're still living a time of fear and censorship which is heartbreaking.

Courting controversy?

In terms of writing, I never think of myself as controversial. Other people call it that, but I think of it as real world, I write realistic fiction and in writing realistic fiction, I try to represent all the people and as many people as I can get in the world who are walking through the world on sort of pages.

I remember when I wrote If You Come Softly which is a retelling of Romeo and Juliet and I tried to make a present day story about Romeo and Juliet and the kind of relationship, between a middle class African-American boy and a middle class white Jewish girl.

It got challenged and it got challenged because of the inter-racial relationship, and this is what 30 years, 40 years after the miscegenation laws were taken out of the world.

I don't get to experience it a lot, but I know people do say, why do you write about stuff like this, like people say, well where's the dad in that book? That book is just about a mom and a daughter. I'll say, well by a show of hands, how many of you live with your mom and dad?

Maybe half or a quarter will raise their hands, and then how many of you live with your mom, how many of you live with your grandma, how many of you live with foster parents, how many of you live with two moms or two dads?. Then I talk about how there are all kinds of ways to have family and that's why in those books, that's that family. We don't know where the dad is, because I didn't write him into the book.

I'm also really careful in how I qualify. One thing I grew up with was literature where I'd read and it'd say, well a boy walked down the street and then a girl walked down the street and then a black boy walked down the street. I thought, okay so I assume whiteness unless otherwise stated.

I never do that. When I was teaching, I never let my students do that, if you qualify the race of one, qualify the race of the other so that the reader doesn't feel like I'm on the outside of this because I'm that black boy reading this story or I'm that white boy reading this story.

That kind of stuff is really important and urgent to me, but I think a lot of times people are uncomfortable with it and they're going to continue to be uncomfortable with. I think it's part of the reason I write for young adults because they're not.

They're just figuring it all out and they're open and they're brilliant. They're going to change the world.

Developing a voice

I wanted to be a writer since I was seven, but I didn't grow up in family where there were writers, I'm trying to write things, I want to grow up and be homeless. My family said you're never going to make any money, are you crazy, this isn't what we do, you need to get a job.

Okay that's a nice hobby, what are you going to do to make some money and eventually get out of house? I wouldn't tell the truth, I would say, I'm going to be a teacher, I'm going to be a lawyer, I'm going to be a hairdresser, whatever. But I knew I was going to be a writer.

I wrote all the time and I had teachers who encourage it. I had teachers who saw that brilliance is passionately recognized, that if someone has something they're really passionate at, that's their brilliance, and how do we grow that or help them to grow that?

I wrote all the time, I copied writers. I remember finding a collection of poems, American Negro poetry anthology and I read it through, I memorized all these poems. I started to write like Vaughn McKay and Arthur Lloyd and Langston Hughes, of course.

I just knew that I wanted to be a writer, and when my family realized I was serious, I would walk into the room, they would get quiet because they're thinking, she's going to write all about us and she's writing and I'm thinking, you guys are not that interesting.

I couldn't say that, I would get in trouble. I wanted to write about my community because I wanted to put the world I knew on the page. I had never read books about Brooklyn, I had never read books about people going from Brooklyn to South Carolina and back again until I read Zeely by Virginia Hamilton.

That was one of the first books that I thought, wow, not only is this person writing about stuff that I know but it's a black woman writing about it. Black women do write books and it was a moment that turned me around, just like the moment with John Steptoe and reading Stevie.

I started discovering other writers like James Baldwin and Alex Walker and reading all these stories that were so populated with people who were familiar to me, really just made the fire to write burn even hotter.

I wrote all the time and the first novel was Last Summer with Maizon which is about two girls growing up in Brooklyn and one gets accepted to a predominantly white boarding school and what that means to leave your community and come back to your community.

What does it mean to the people who you've left? Then as I got braver as a writer, I started moving out of my community and feel in the first book, The Notebooks of Melon and Son was the first time I wrote from the point of view of a guy. I'd written all these books from the point of view of girls and I said, I know can do that.

Let me try this other thing and it took forever, it took about two and a half years and I just struggled and I couldn't get his voice on the page. I asked my brothers and they didn't remember what it was like to be that age. I watched guys on the playground and that wasn't what I was going for.

I just did this thing where I said, if I had a son what would he do right? What would I want to be like? If I had a best friend that was a boy, what would he be like? If three boys were in a room, what would they talk about and just ask myself all these questions and finally started forming this kid.

The more I wrote him, the more I liked him and the more I tried to make them real. From there, I went on to write I Hadn't Meant to Tell You This, which was the first time I wrote from the point of view of a poor white girl, and then If You Come Softly and Miracle Boys with all guys in it, trying to write a book that didn't have any girls in it.

Don't worry about the audience

One of the things I find a lot when I'm traveling is that kids talk about having writer's block and I actually don't believe in writer's block. I think it's more fear based and I think it's important that we get young people to realize, as I said earlier, they have stories to tell and they have a right to tell those stories.

I think once they're freed up to know they have a right to tell those stories, and they begin to tell them without the judgment of family or friends or teachers. I always think it's important to say to kids when you give them a writing assignment that no one is going to see this.

Write as much as you want and tell everything and put it all on the page. Then rewrite it and rewrite and in that rewrite, put down everything you want us to see and get rid of everything else. That gives them a draft and a rewrite almost immediately.

Then the next time you write, say well, this time you're going to read it out loud, why don't you practice reading out loud, do you like the way it sounds? Are you stumbling over any words? But also keep it short. I think not to write three pages but to write a page and sometimes when you have to write a page, but write a paragraph.

For the young writers, try to write 15 minutes a day and tell your story and read. I mean the way your learn to write is by reading and reading the same books sometimes over and over and understanding how the author tells the story and how you probably have a lot in common with what the author is doing.

Excerpt from Peace, Locomotion

My name is Jacqueline Woodson, and this is Peace, Locomotion which is a sequel to Locomotion, and Locomotion was written entirely in verse. He was learning how to write poetry and tell the story of his life through poetry. Then I decided to write a sequel, and it's written in letters.

These are letters to his younger sister chronicling the time that they're separated which is now. They're living apart, and he's living with his foster mom and a foster brother named Rodney, and he has a second foster brother who's fighting in the war. This is a letter to his

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Transcript from an interview with Jacqueline Woodson

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Below is an edited transcript from Reading Rockets' interview with Carole Boston Weatherford. The transcript is divided into the following clips: My name is Jacqueline Woodson, and I've known I wanted to be a writer since I was seven years old. I've written 29 books now, everything from picture books to middle grade to young adult, fiction.

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Illustrated by Hudson Talbott

This is the first time I've written a book based on some of my own family history. 'Show Ways", or quilts, once served as secret maps for freedom-seeking slaves. This is the story of seven generations of girls and women who were quilters and artists and freedom fighters.

Where it takes place:

It begins in Virginia and ends right here in Brooklyn.

Where I wrote it:

The story began in my grandmother's living room in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn. I wrote it here in Park Slope, Brooklyn mostly.

Why I wrote it:

After my grandmother died and my daughter was born, I wanted to figure out a way to hold on to all the amazing history in our family. I wanted a Show Way for my own daughter.

Awards

Newbery Honor Medal

Booklist Editor's Choice

BookLinks Lasting Connections

State Lists

Indiana (nominee)

Georgia (nominee)

Louisiana (nominee)

South Carolina (nominee)

Tennessee (nominee)

Pennsylvania (nominee)

Michigan (nominee)

Categories Posted on Picture books

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Illustrated by Hudson Talbott This is the first time I've written a book based on some of my own family history. 'Show Ways", or quilts, once served as secret maps for freedom-seeking slaves. This is the story of seven generations of girls and women who were quilters and artists and freedom fighters.

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THIS IS THE ROPE By Jacqueline Woodson, Read By Channie Waites by AudioFile Magazine

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Channie Waites celebrates hope narrating this moving story of a multigenerational family of African-Americans, as they pack and move from their beloved pine-scented South to pursue dreams of freedom in the North. Musical background adds playful texture, suggesting the chronological progression of years. 

Read the full AudioFile  review at http://www.audiofilemagazine.com/reviews/read/93968/

Support for AudioFile's Sound Reviews comes from Grammy Award-winning publisher Hachette Audio Hachette Audio, home to works by James Patterson, JK Rowling, Joel Osteen, David Sedaris, David Baldacci, Elin Hilderbrand, Michael Connelly, and many more bestselling audiobooks https://soundcloud.com/hachetteaudio

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We are super excited to share the first of our 5 Questions series, which celebrates great YA authors as well as YARN's 5th Anniversary. How lucky are we that this first one is with the one and only JACQUELINE WOODSON?? Enough said, right?

YARN: Congrats on the National Book Award for Young People's Literature, a Newbery Honor, a Sibert Honor, and the Coretta Scott King Award for Brown Girl Dreaming!

JW: Thanks!

YARN: You write a lot about memory and the making of memories, in Brown Girl Dreaming, often in relation to writing. What has been the relationship of memory to your writing, in your career overall? Has it always been a harmonious relationship, or have there been times when your writing has had to overcome memory, or at least shove it aside?

JW: My writing always starts from a place of memory. Often that memory is a feeling-some way of being I remember from my past that inspires a story. I hold fast to memory, believing that it's important to know our past to understand our present so memories from long ago stay with me. Has it always been harmonious? Yes and no. But what is? At some point I do, as a writer of fiction, have to say "This is not about YOU, it's about the character." At that point, I have to move away from memory into a more creative space. But I can't write without both the creative self and the self that's steeped in memory.

YARN: Your writing and ruminations feel very inclusive (your beautiful "poetic" friendship with Maria and the tone of the last 2 poems in Brown Girl Dreaming bring this strongly to mind). Is this something you strive for consciously? Part of what I'm asking is, with so much emphasis recently on diversity in children's literature (which we applaud!!), do you ever feel there is a difference, when it comes to the actual writing, between celebrating "difference" or "inclusiveness"? Or is this a false dichotomy?

JW: That's a really great question. I think it's about honesty and a deep sense of self. I deeply believe in my past and the many moments that brought me to this place. The specific becomes universal so I know I'm not going to "lose" a reader by staying true to what matters to me. I love being African American. I love being female. I love having grown up in South Carolina and Brooklyn. I love the part of me that steeped in Buckeye pride. So I want to bring this love to the page. It's not a fad or something that I'm trying to do to sell books. It's not something I'm trying to reach for. It just is what it is-my truth, my passion. And I think that this love coming through speaks to so many people across lines of race, class, gender, ability, etc. Because even as it remains specifically mine, it becomes part of a bigger, more universal truth. I like to believe that we all have love for who we are, and we love seeing it mirrored in the lives of others.

YARN: With you winning the National Book Award last year, and Kwame Alexander winning the Newbery Medal for The Crossover, we wonder if you think that books in verse are having a moment-and why that might be? (We're asking Kwame the same question, so it will be fun to compare your answers!)

JW: You know... Our attention spans are shorter. We tweet 140 characters and call it correspondence. We zip from link to link, check our phones as we're writing emails on our computers. And here in New York, we've always carried on many conversations at once. Of course this is the perfect time for poetry (and graphic novels / memoirs). I think the way we read and write is changing quickly. I'm reading one of those multi-layered, many-paged chaptered novels and it feels almost luxurious to immerse in this kind of book in this present day environment. That said, I like to believe that poetry is always going to save us. I read so much Rumi when I was younger. Whenever I was feeling lost, I'd picked up his work and get centered again. I have so many poets that do that for me now. So I think there is something about the way verse grounds us.

YARN: You've written in many genres, from children's picture books to middle grade and YA novels. How did you know that Brown Girl Dreaming was definitely going to be a memoir, as opposed to a more fictionalized account? How did you know it needed to be in verse?

JW: It's memory. Memory comes in these small moments with all of this white space around the moment. Writing this as a straight narrative, given what it is, would have felt insincere and wrong. My mom died suddenly and I knew I wanted to go back and understand who she was before she was my mom and how I came to be the writer I am. It was time for a memoir. It was time to understand.

YARN: What kind of reaction did your family members have when they heard/read about their involvement in the book? Did you ever worry about their reactions while writing? What did you do with those worries in order to continue writing?

JW: I can't worry about my family while I'm writing. That would make me censor myself. When I first write, I say to myself "No one is ever going to see this." And then I let myself write whatever it is I want to write. I didn't show my siblings Brown Girl Dreaming until I was pretty close to being done with it. They trust me to remember - My family has always been amazed by my memory. My siblings are pretty awesome. My sister loves the book. My brothers are just proud about whatever I do. I think if my mom and grandma were still alive, they'd be happy. My dad showed up to Cover To Cover in Columbus and bought two copies! I call him Jack-I didn't really know him until he and my mom got back together when I was 13. I was like "Jack-I can give you copies for free!" He just chuckled and said, "You know I got to support my girl!" I love that guy!

YARN: Well, we love your writing! Thanks for much for answering our 5 questions, and for writing Brown Girl Dreaming.

....But Readers, she's written way more great stuff than Brown Girl Dreaming (in case you didn't know)! Children's picture books like Every Kindness and This Is the Rope; Middle Grade novels like Maizon at Blue Hill; and YA novels like Beneath a Meth Moon, Hush, and Behind You. Find out all kinds of cool things about who, where, and why she wrote her books, plus some excellent little biographical FAQ-toids at her website, http://www.jacquelinewoodson.com/.

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We are super excited to share the first of our 5 Questions series, which celebrates great YA authors as well as YARN's 5th Anniversary. How lucky are we that this first one is with the one and only JACQUELINE WOODSON?? Enough said, right?

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Selected books illustrated by James Ransome. Please click the images to go to related pages.

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This is a fictive memoir. From the early 1900s until the mid 1970s, more than 6 million African Americans moved from the rural south to northern cities. This novel is inspired by those families and by my own Mom, who moved from Greenville, South Carolina to Brooklyn, New York in 1968.
The book begins:

This is the rope my grandmother found
beneath an old tree
a long time ago
back home in South Carolina.
This is the rope my grandmother skipped
under the shade of a sweet-smelling pine.

Where it takes place:

It starts out in South Carolina and ends in Brooklyn, NY

Where I wrote it:

In Brooklyn and in Virginia.

Why I wrote it:

I wanted to tell the story of how some Black people came to New York City. When I began writing it, my mom was still living. She didn't live to see the final book but I think it would make her very proud. She came to Brooklyn a long time ago and if she hadn't come to New York, I wouldn't have grown up here! I couldn't even imagine that!

Categories Posted on Picture books

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This is a fictive memoir. From the early 1900s until the mid 1970s, more than 6 million African Americans moved from the rural south to northern cities. This novel is inspired by those families and by my own Mom, who moved from Greenville, South Carolina to Brooklyn, New York in 1968.

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Skip to Main Content (Press Enter)

"Woodson's ( Each Kindness) gentle, unpretentious writing and Ransome's eloquent artwork breathe life into this story of a close-knit African-American family and their pursuit of a better life . . . The chronicle of a homely object in an age of disposables and the sense of place Woodson and Ransome evoke make this an especially strong and vibrant fictive memoir."- Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Expressive oil paintings illustrate the clean, well-cadenced text in scenes that include well-researched period details . . . There's no doubt of the warmth and strength of the family ties that bind these individuals together."- Booklist

"The rope becomes a symbol of family tradition and continuity against a backdrop of historical and social change. Woodson's understated but eloquent text gives specific details of one family's experience, while Ransome's rich oil paintings provide historical context."- The Horn Book

"A warm family saga of a household united by love, pride and an uncommon heirloom. The repetition of the title in a nursery-rhyme style will resonate with young listeners. Ransome's vivid, full-bleed, double-page-spread oil paintings create an upbeat, welcoming vista of rural South Carolina and urban Brooklyn . . . A quiet affirmation of a strong and close-knit family that, along with so many other African-Americans, found a better life as part of the Great Migration."- Kirkus Reviews

"Spare, eloquent . . . A beautifully told family tale about a loving, close-knit African-American family over several decades . . . The language is deliberate and lyrical. . . . Landscapes indicative both of the changing geography and the passing of time . . . remarkable, with light falling on faces at the perfect angle and facial features carrying abundant emotion. Young listeners . . . [will] be drawn to this warm and hope-filled tale."- The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books

"A poignant, realistic, generational story. Woodson masterfully weaves a tale of an African American family's move from the rural south to New York City . . . Ransome's beautifully rich oil paintings add depth and interest . . . The perfect picture book to include in a study of The Great Migration . . . An excellent tale to include in a study of family histories. It is a picture book to savor as a read-aloud."- Library Media Connection

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This Is the Rope by Jacqueline Woodson: 9780425288948 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

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Skip to Main Content (Press Enter) "Woodson's ( Each Kindness) gentle, unpretentious writing and Ransome's eloquent artwork breathe life into this story of a close-knit African-American family and their pursuit of a better life . . .

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This month we've been looking closely at how the art and written text in picturebooks work together to convey meaning and exploring how to help children experience the full richness in picturebooks by reading both. This week we'll examine how Jenna Loomis read My Name Is Sangoel, written by Karen Lynn Williams (2009) and Khandra Mohammed and illustrated by Catherine Stock, with her first graders.

In the story, Sangoel, his mother, and sister move from their home in Sudan to the United States after the war leaves them as refugees and their father/husband dies fighting. Sangoel treasures his Dinka name, which his father and grandfather held before him, and is bothered when no one in his new community can pronounce it. Sangoel thinks of a clever solution which helps others know his name and makes him begin to feel at home in the United States. Catherine Stock's mixed-media illustrations bring watercolor, photographs, and collage into a meaningful whole just as Sangoel's life of mixed cultural experiences becomes a meaningful whole and he comes to know and appreciate who he is.

Jenna knew her first graders had little background on Sudan and refugees so before reading the book, she searched the Baltimore County Schools database and found a digital book to examine with them. As Jenna read and they looked at the photographs together, the children talked about what they noticed about the people, where they lived, etc. Jenna also explained that not everyone in Sudan is a refugee. When Jenna started to read the book the children noticed the sand/desert and clothing, similar to what they saw in the digital book, and that the houses in the book were different than the houses they live in. Jenna asked them to "read like an illustrator" as she continued the book to see what Stock did in her art to help them understand the story.

After reading the story, the children sat in circle to have a "genuine conversation". In response to the story, Jessica thought "you have to be brave to move to another country", Mark said it's important that you "don't forget who you are", and Cory commented about listening carefully to how someone's name sounds and not to make fun of them. When Jenna asked what they noticed as they read like illustrators, the children's comments included, "She worked with newspapers," "She made a collage," "She filled the whole page with color," "She used dark outlines," and "She used dark colors in Africa and lighter colors in the American illustrations." They thought Stock did those things because it was more creative to use newspaper and because she liked the designs on the papers she cut for clothing. Jenna made a "How Catherine Stock Worked to Illustrate" anchor chart that included the children's comments.

To help the children explore who they are using art similar to Stock's art, Jenna incorporated several aspects of the children's identity into a mixed media project. Earlier in the year she had photographed each child and collected background on the children's names from the parents. These were part of the children's art. In addition, as part of their homework, the children cut pictures of things they liked or are important to them from magazines. Using the pictures, crayons/colored pencils, and information on their names, the children created art that showed something important and special about them.

In her art, Anika included her favorite foods, an American Girl doll and ballet doll because those are special to her, and a Christmas tree because "I wanted it to be Christmas Eve". Anika showed her excitement by raising her arm and placing triangles over her head, similar to how Mo Willems shows excitement in his art. Her name information states, "My name is Anika. My name is special because it is easy to pronounce in both Spanish and English. My mother had two friends growing up whose names were Anika."

Shai likes the jungle and drew himself there surrounded by animals. Only part of a branch shows on the left "because the rest is off the page." For his name, the information reads, "My name is Shai. Shai means gift. My name is special because I am named after my great-grandfather, Samuel. My name is a special Hebrew name."

Experiences like Jenna provided her students in reading and responding to My Name is Sangoel immerse children in the richness of picturebooks. I hope that sharing Jenna's, Laura's, and Michelle's experiences has provided ideas for supporting children in reading the art and written texts in picturebooks.

References

Williams, K.L., & Mohammed, K. (2009). My Name Is Sangoel. Illus. C. Stock. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.
Please visit wowlit.org to browse or search our growing database of books, to read one of our two on-line journals, or to learn more about our mission.

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Exploring and Experiencing: My Name Is Sangoel * Worlds of Words

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This month we've been looking closely at how the art and written text in picturebooks work together to convey meaning and exploring how to help children experience the full richness in picturebooks by reading both. This week we'll examine how Jenna Loomis read My Name Is Sangoel, written by Karen Lynn Williams (2009) and Khandra Mohammed and illustrated by Catherine Stock, with her first graders.

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About the Book

Sangoel is a refugee. Leaving behind his homeland of Sudan, where his father died in the war, he has little to call his own other than his name, a Dinka name handed down, proudly from his father and grandfather before him.

When Sangoel and his mother and sister are resettled in America, things are supposed to be better but life in their new home is strange and lonely. The refugee camp seems better than this place where no one can pronounce his name and some even make jokes about it. Sangoel quietly endures the homesickness and ignores his mother's suggestion that he might want to take an American name. He finally comes up with and ingenious solution to this problem and in the process begins to make friends and perhaps feel a little at home.

Co-authored with Khadra Mohammed and Illustrated by Catherine Stock in bright detailed scenes this is a poignant story of identity and belonging that will help young readers understand the plight of many children around the world as well as in their own neighborhoods.

Behind the Story

Four Feet Two Sandals, takes place in Peswar, a refugees camp in Pakistan. Khadra and I knew we wanted to write another book about a refuge child after resettlement in the US, a child who has left the camp, an a story about a refugee from another part of the world, a boy this time. My Name is Sangoel again grew out of Khadra's intimate knowledge of and experience with refugee children around the world. I too was well aware of the importance of names to all peoples as individuals. It is common knowledge that many immigrants and refugees who have come to the United States have had to change their names or for various reasons had their names changed for them. My own grandfather changed his name after emigrating from Hungary. Like Sangoel he felt unwelcome in his new home. He hoped an American name, easier to pronounce would help him fit into a new culture in his new home. In this story Sangoel solves his problem without changing his name.

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About the Book Sangoel is a refugee. Leaving behind his homeland of Sudan, where his father died in the war, he has little to call his own other than his name, a Dinka name handed down, proudly from his father and grandfather before him.

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I'm Your Neighbor Books: Immigration Children's Literature

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My Name is Sangoel
By Karen Lynn Williams and Khadra Mohammed
Illustrated by Catherine Stock
Published by Eerdmans Books

"...This simple story puts a child-friendly spin on a common immigrant experience as the child's classmates respond with similar puzzle pictures of their own names." -Kathleen Isaacs, School Library Journal

Description
Sangoel is a refugee. Leaving behind his homeland of Sudan, where his father died in the war, he has little to call his own other than his name, a Dinka name handed down proudly from his father and grandfather before him. When Sangoel and his mother and sister arrive in the United States, everything seems very strange and unlike home. In this busy, noisy place, with its escalators and television sets and traffic and snow, Sangoel quietly endures the fact that no one can pronounce his name. Lonely and homesick, he finally comes up with an ingenious solution to this problem, and in the process he at last begins to feel at home.

Reviews & Accolades
"... This simple story puts a child-friendly spin on a common immigrant experience as the child's classmates respond with similar puzzle pictures of their own names...The diversity of the boy's schoolmates is evident in Stock's skillfully detailed watercolor and collage illustrations. An endnote gives more information about refugees and refugee camps as well as about Dinka naming practices. This picture book by the authors of Four Feet, Two Sandals (Eerdmans, 2007) is an excellent addition to the growing body of immigration stories for young readers." -Kathleen Isaacs, School Library Journal

"...The immigrant experience is clearly portrayed in his story...Subsequent scenes focus on people, continuing the theme of the humanistic story. The boy and his family become genuine personalities we care about. The front jacket/cover illustration of Sangoel watching American boys playing soccer with the back showing boys in Africa doing the same carries the book's message of commonality of cultures." - Children's Literature

"The authors of Four Feet, Two Sandals (2007, illustrated by Doug Chayka) craft another sensitively written, hope-filled immigrant story, this one featuring a young Sudanese refugee who finds an inventive way to break the ice in his new American school...Though a skinny eight-year-old with downcast eyes, Sangoel is such a picture of quiet dignity that readers will come away admiring his courage and self-possession." - Kirkus Reviews

"... It imparts the emotional challenges of the refugee experience without dragging young readers too deeply through the horrors of war. It illustrates that even those fortunate enough to be resettled must deal with their difficult pasts while navigating a new present and trying to maintain a sense of themselves as whole individuals. Children will be impressed with Sangoel's story and ingenuity. It is clear that the family will not have an easy life, but with resilience and resourcefulness they will overcome their challenges." -Abigail Sawyer, Paper Tigers

Groups Represented
Sudanese

Themes
Immigration, cultural identity, family death

Author Research
Since I have lived in other countries and cultures for extended periods of time throughout the last 30 years, it is only natural that I have come to use the material from these experiences in my writing. Beyond that meeting people from other cultures and experiencing life outside my own world of comfort is a passion and joy for me and all successful writing must grow out of the author's passions.

When I wrote my first book I did have some concerns and was less than confident about how Galimoto, a book about a boy in Malawi, Africa, by a white woman from Connecticut, would be received. But I did my research which involved mostly getting to know the children of Malawi and following them as they worked and played. Knowing the language helped me a lot to understand the culture.

As I continued to travel and live abroad I began to realize that many of the children I met all over the work had much in common and I became more comfortable as I felt I knew my characters very well.

When Khadra asked me to co-author picture books about refugees, she told me that a young girl from Pakistan asked her why there were no books for children like her. I was intrigued but I had to do my research. I began volunteering with refugee children, interviewing them and reading fiction and non-fiction by and about refugees around the world. I caught the passion. Khadra was a kindred spirit with similar sensibilities toward the work as I have. She had the stories and I had the knowledge of the craft. It was a perfect match.

Engagement Projects
View a Discussion Guide PDF View a Teacher's Guide PDF HERE

Leave a comment and let us know how you use this title!

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My Name is Sangoel By Karen Lynn Williams and Khadra Mohammed Illustrated by Catherine Stock Published by Eerdmans Books "...This simple story puts a child-friendly spin on a common immigrant experience as the child's classmates respond with similar puzzle pictures of their own names." -Kathleen Isaacs, School Library Journal Description Sangoel is a refugee.

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HARDCOVER; Published: 6/1/2009

Ages 6-10
Full-color Illustrations Throughout
Lexile: AD440L

Sangoel is a refugee. Leaving behind his homeland of Sudan, where his father died in the war, he has little to call his own other than his name, a Dinka name handed down proudly from his father and grandfather before him.

When Sangoel and his mother and sister arrive in the United States, everything seems very strange and unlike home. In this busy, noisy place, with its escalators and television sets and traffic and snow, Sangoel quietly endures the fact that no one is able to pronounce his name. Lonely and homesick, he finally comes up with an ingenious solution to this problem, and in the process he at last begins to feel at home.

Written by the authors of the acclaimed Four Feet, Two Sandals, this poignant story of identity and belonging will help young readers understand the plight of the millions of children in the world who are refugees.

Smithsonian Magazine, Notable Books for Children (2009)
Children's Book Council, Notable Social Studies Trade Books for Young People (2010)
International Reading Association-Children's Book Council Joint Committee, Children's Choices (2010)
Maine Association of School Libraries, Chickadee Award Nominee (2010)
Pennsylvania Library Association, Carolyn W. Field Award, Honor Book (2010)
Children's Africana Book Awards, Noteworthy (2010)
Washington Children's Choice Picture Book Award, Nominee (2011)
Arkansas Diamond Primary Book Award, Finalist (2011)
Keystone State Reading Association, Keystone to Reading Book Award Nominee (2010-2011)
Cooperative Children's Book Center (CCBC), Choices (2010)
Friends of the Roanoke County Public Library, Roanoke Valley Reads (2011)
Junior Library Guild, Selection
United Society of Friends Women International (USFWI), Reading List

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My Name Is Sangoel - Catherine Stock, Karen Lynn Williams, Khadra Mohammed : Eerdmans

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HARDCOVER; Published: 6/1/2009 Ages 6-10Full-color Illustrations ThroughoutLexile: AD440L Sangoel is a refugee. Leaving behind his homeland of Sudan, where his father died in the war, he has little to call his own other than his name, a Dinka name handed down proudly from his father and grandfather before him.

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Jeri Watts: A Piece of Home

Interviewed by Margot Abel, Associate Director, Ezra Jack Keats Foundation

A Piece of Home is your second picture book. Meanwhile, you've published short stories, science fiction, middle-school fiction and a textbook. What brought you back to picture books?
I write what comes to me...a story, an idea that is "given" to me and the form the idea needs or chooses. I started telling this story in my typical form-prose-and within three pages, it just felt like a picture book. Within those three pages I was bored, so I knew a reader would be bored. I began again. This happened three times before I realized I could not tell this story in my standard way. I wondered if the story wanted to be told in a more poetic form. I did my best, and the story flowed so much better. The best thing I can do is "listen" to the story: what does it want, where do the characters want it to go? I am open to writing whatever the stories tell me they need to be.

When you write a picture book, how do you make room for the illustrator?
At first I just follow the story. I'm writing, I guess, for an audience of me. Then, in the revisions, I check to make sure I've done right by the audience of potential readers. Finally, I think about a potential illustrator. Are there opportunities for an illustrator to pull in the readers who love to sit and "read" a book through the pictures?
Your book is very timely in shining a light on an immigrant family adjusting to a new culture. What other issues do you think need to be addressed in children's literature?
I do seem to have gotten timing right, but that was unintentional. I wrote the story because it had meaning to me. I had this one "inside" me since I taught this child [on whom the story is based] about twelve years ago, but I hadn't found the way into the tale.

I feel there are so many important issues we need to address-just walk in a classroom and see what the children are dealing with-but it really depends on what I feel I can tell well. These issues will find a way into stories if I step out of the way and let them flow naturally, through the story that presents itself as a strong character I can explore, or a "what if" idea I can follow. For me, it doesn't work to say, "I'll write a story about bullying or racism."

Was Ezra Jack Keats an influence on your work as a writer? As a teacher?
It surprises me to admit this, but I haven't read many picture book authors as influences. I've read them, mostly, as a teacher of writing. So, as a teacher, yes, Keats has been influential. I used his books with my elementary students-I taught struggling readers and read his work aloud-so some of my students would see themselves on the page (as I think he hoped they would). Older students could also see examples of good writing. I would point out things he did as a writer that they could emulate. I also have used his books with my pre-service teacher students as well as my master's students (who will be reading specialists) so that they will use them, too. Keats is a master!
Now that you draw my attention to this, I realize I have been influenced by his work! I have always tried to write stories that recall the character of people who tend to go unnoticed by society. These are the people I am drawn to in real life. While life was teaching me this lesson, I think I was also learning from teaching Keats's work. He wrote about and illustrated everyday children doing everyday things, and made them extraordinary (or, they were for us, his audience). He captured, for us, the chance to see that everyday matters, and that writers should see value in everyday.

How do you think the EJK Book Award will affect your career as a writer?
I cannot even imagine...I cannot even hope. But it has affected me personally. I feel validated. I have many small publications, and I celebrated my books that were published...but now, I know that I have won a prestigious award. It is like having the arms of your friends wrapped around you every time you write-a stamp of approval that says, "You've got this." It is recognition from peers that has my heart singing. I'm sure it will fade (everything does), but for now, it is quite a lovely feeling.

What advice do you have for hopeful young writers?
Read, read, read in the field (and other fields too) and write, write, write. Also, as is said (I paraphrase) in one of the Harry Potter books, "Don't forget to live." Then you have material! I am a "new" writer at an older age, but I don't think I could have written my books without the experience and whatever wisdom I've gained throughout the years. And I could never have written this book without my time as a teacher. I don't think I could have written well when I was young, I hadn't read deeply enough; I hadn't written enough. I'm still working at it.
Read more about Jeri Watts

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Interviewed by Margot Abel, Associate Director, Ezra Jack Keats Foundation A Piece of Home is your second picture book. Meanwhile, you've published short stories, science fiction, middle-school fiction and a textbook. What brought you back to picture books? I write what comes to me...a story, an idea that is "given" to me and the form the idea needs or chooses.

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KIRKUS REVIEW

Moving from Korea to West Virginia, a young boy leaves the familiar behind.

Watts begins this immigration story with Hee Jun describing his remarkable grandmother, who had sparkling eyes. "My grandmother could find the extraordinary held within the ordinary." She coaxes the national tree of Korea, called the mugunghwa, to flower, revealing delicate blossoms with bright red centers. Readers are shown Hee Jun's life back home, where he is ordinary. "A regular boy, playing and laughing and bossing my little sister." Life seems easy and commonplace. With the announcement of the move, the little boy swings from a carefree outlook to concern and frustration. The narration clearly describes his irritation with the language barrier, while the illustrations show Korean Hangul lettering in his dialogue bubbles. Emotions show clearly in Hee Jun's moon-shaped face as round-eyed classmates stare and the teacher speaks loudly to him. This tangible emotional struggle extends to others in the family as well. His little sister acts out, and grandmother loses her sparkle. But slowly, over time, the family adjusts to the new world, with Hee Jun teaching his grandmother the English name for mugunghwa. Watts' clear storytelling successfully conveys Hee Jun's emotional journey to readers, and Yum's emotive illustrations sensitively complement the text.

Immigrant children will relate to the head-spinning switch from ordinary to different, and their classmates might better understand the emotional impact of moving to a foreign land. (Picture book. 5-10)

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A PIECE OF HOME by Jeri Watts , Hyewon Yum | Kirkus Reviews

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Moving from Korea to West Virginia, a young boy leaves the familiar behind. Watts begins this immigration story with Hee Jun describing his remarkable grandmother, who had sparkling eyes. "My grandmother could find the extraordinary held within the ordinary." She coaxes the national tree of Korea, called the mugunghwa, to flower, revealing delicate blossoms with bright red centers.

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policies | piracy | site map | &copy 2016 - Candlewick Press

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8/8/2018 1:24:00 PM
Book by Dawes Teacher Explores Immigration and Departure

"Whether it's a happy feeling or a sad feeling because of war or whatever is going on in your country, you have that last day that you're home," said Dahlia Richards as she talked about the day in 1987 when she and her family left Jamaica for Evanston.
Although she writes from the perspective of a fictitious character named Amoya, Ms. Richards based her recently published children's book, "Amoya's Big Move," on her own last day in her native country.

Amoya wakes up on the day they are leaving, packs while her sister is making breakfast and people are coming by to claim the things that they are not taking. Then a pickup truck comes to take Amoya and her family to the airport, and they ride in the uncovered flatbed of the truck.

"I wanted that feeling of sitting there and seeing everything that you've known just go on by. You're heading to the airport, and for some people it is the last time that they are going to see it," said Ms. Richards. "I think that the story connects to anybody, even if they are going from one city to another or one house to another . . . but in my mind, I was focused on my ESL [English as a Second Language] students that are coming in."

While the book only covers Amoya's and her family's departure from Jamaica, this is Ms. Richards first book, and she hinted that a next installment of Amoya's journey as an immigrant may follow.

The book is bilingual, including both English and Spanish text, a nod to students at Dawes Elementary School, where she has been an ESL teacher for five years. Dawes is one of the five District 65 schools that offer bilingual education. Ms. Richards said that she wrote the book, in part, because of the waves of immigrant children who come to the school each year.

She is tri-lingual, speaking Patois (pronounced patwah), the principal Jamaican language, English and Spanish, and taught ESL in Mexico after studying there to become an ESL teacher. "I really wanted the book to be in Spanish as well as English, because our school is a bilingual immersion school," said Ms. Richards. But speaking of her own experience, she said that learning a new language when she arrived in Evanston was only one of the challenges. Most of the food in America was so different for her and not appealing, her family was very poor and she and her cousin, who came to Evanston at the same time, were picked on at school.

Ms. Richards talked about what she works to ensure for her students. "As a teacher, I'm educating my kids. I'm not indoctrinating them or saying, 'You need to do this,' . . . but the type of books that we read in the classroom, the type of conversations that we have, the words that I use to describe things and my reaction to things that are going on are meant to help them understand that . . . we are all people." She said she feels a responsibility as a teacher to help the generations that are coming up to respect those around them.

Offering other examples of ways that Dawes builds respect and understanding, Ms. Richards described the school's multicultural nights, which represent all the kids who attend school there, whether they have recently come as immigrants or their family has been here for generations. Ms. Richards said that families sign up to bring food for multicultural night and do other things that are representative of their culture. She offered an example of a family with Irish ancestry that brought soda bread and said, "Everybody gets to be proud of their ancestry."

She said that she especially enjoys the food aspect of the evening and then shifted to speak of her love for Jamaican food. Her eyes sparkled as she described where it can be found in Rogers Park and how family and other visitors from Jamaica bring things she cannot find here. "My favorite food would have to be fried dumplings - and the recipe for it is in the book. Then . . . ice cream," said Ms. Richards. "In Jamaica, there is a guy that rides around on a bicycle selling ice cream - cherry-pineapple, grape nut, rum raisin - grape nut is my, my family's absolute favorite flavor. It is so good; oh-my-gosh it is amazing. You have to get it. I will find it and bring it, but you have to try it."

Ms. Richards' favorite Jamaican foods play a prominent role in "Amoya's Big Move." On one page the illustrator, Terri Kelleher, depicts bright images of patties (meat pies) and the kind of fresh juice-boxes Ms. Richards said cannot be found in the U.S.

It was important to her to tell her story of leaving Jamaica now, in part because of the kidney disease that she has experienced in the last couple of years and her concern that she might not be able to tell it in the future. She said that while she did not explain all the details of her illness to her students, "They knew something was going on. I was going to appointments, and because my [kidney] function was declining, I couldn't eat certain things. They know how much I love all kinds of food."

This past spring, she was notified that she had been matched with a kidney donor and then quickly and quietly made preparations to be absent for the last two weeks of the school year. While her colleagues were aware, she decided it would be best not to inform the children of all the details until the day before her last day. She said that when she told her students about the surgery they talked about it and cried together, and that messages went out in the weeks after the surgery to keep them informed of her recovery.

On the afternoon that she was interviewed by the RoundTable for this article, Ms. Richards was spotted in the children's section of the Evanston Public Library by a Dawes student who alerted her mother and another adult, who were standing nearby. Ms. Richards had put her protective mask back on. She had taken it off for photographs but still wears it because of the decreased immunity that was induced to ensure that the transplanted kidney would not be rejected by her body. But her eyes revealed that she was smiling behind the mask. As she extended her hand, one of the women, with a big smile and eyes open wide, asked, "We can touch you now?" Ms. Richards nodded yes, and the handshake became a round of hugs.

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Book by Dawes Teacher Explores Immigration and Departure - Evanston RoundTable

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8/8/2018 1:24:00 PM Book by Dawes Teacher Explores Immigration and Departure "Whether it's a happy feeling or a sad feeling because of war or whatever is going on in your country, you have that last day that you're home," said Dahlia Richards as she talked about the day in 1987 when she and her family left Jamaica for Evanston.Although she writes from the perspective of a fictitious character named Amoya, Ms. Richards based her recently published children's book, "Amoya's Big Move," on her own last day in her native country.

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I'm Your Neighbor Books: Immigration Children's Literature

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Where Are You From?
By Yamile Saied Mendez
Illustrated by Jaime Kim
Published by HarperCollins Publishers
ISBN-13: 9780062839930
Age Range: 4+

"Although the book begins as a gentle riposte to narrow cultural and ethnic categorizations, its conclusion reaches out to all readers, evoking both heritage and the human family..." -Publishers Weekly
This resonant picture book tells the story of one girl who constantly gets asked a simple question that doesn't have a simple answer. A great conversation starter in the home or classroom.

When a girl is asked where she's from-where she's really from-none of her answers seems to be the right one.

Unsure about how to reply, she turns to her loving abuelo for help. He doesn't give her the response she expects. She gets an even better one.

Where am I from?

You're from hurricanes and dark storms, and a tiny singing frog that calls the island people home when the sun goes to sleep....

With themes of self-acceptance, identity, and home, this powerful, lyrical picture book will resonate with readers young and old, from all backgrounds and of all colors-especially anyone who ever felt that they don't belong.

"A girl with brown skin and dark curly pigtails encounters variations on the title question over and over. "Is your mom from here?" asks her ballet teacher. "Is your dad from there?" asks a friend's mother. From her Abuelo, the girl learns she comes from the Pampas region of Argentina, and that she descends from "the gaucho, brave and strong" and those who were once "in chains because of the color of their skin." As text by Méndez (Blizzard Besties) transports the duo, Kim (La La La) places them at the center of a series of expansive digitized-watercolor spreads that celebrate various natural wonders and history (with no afterword, however-readers are on their own to decode the historic and geographic references, such as the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, an Argentine human rights organization). Although the book begins as a gentle riposte to narrow cultural and ethnic categorizations, its conclusion reaches out to all readers, evoking both heritage and the human family: pointing to his heart, Abuelo says, "You're from here, from my love and the love of all those before us.... You are from all of us.""
- Publishers Weekly

"In a world full of microaggressions, Argentine-American author Méndez and South Korean-American illustrator Kim team up to offer an affirming answer for a young brown-skinned girl constantly being asked "Where are you from?" After her reply, "I'm from here, from today, same as everyone else," is contested with a "No, where are you really from?," she takes her internalized confusion to her abuelo, because "he knows everything, and like me, he looks like he doesn't belong." He tells her that she comes from the pampas, the gaucho, mountains, blue oceans, hurricanes, and dark storms. He doesn't shy away from hard truths and tells her that she comes from "this land where our ancestors built a home for all, even when they were in chains because of the color of their skin." Each answer takes them into sweeping double-page landscapes of watercolor and ink that add enough context to understand new vocabulary and texture to fill each space. But when she insists where am I really from, he points to his heart and says, "from my love and the love of all of those before us." A great read-aloud with simple yet evocative language, this picture book will validate many young children's experience, and for others will lend itself well to starting conversations around race and racial aggressions. A much-needed title that is a first purchase for libraries and classrooms."
- School Library Journal

Groups Represented
Argentinean American

#OwnVoices
Bi-racial Identity
Community
Cross-Group Friendship
Cultural Differences
Cultural Identity
Education
Family Relationships
Identity

Setting United States

Engagement Projects & Resources
Share with us how you use the book! Leave a comment!

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Where Are You From? By Yamile Saied Mendez Illustrated by Jaime Kim Published by HarperCollins Publishers ISBN-13: 9780062839930 Age Range: 4+ "Although the book begins as a gentle riposte to narrow cultural and ethnic categorizations, its conclusion reaches out to all readers, evoking both heritage and the human family..."

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Yamile (sha-MEE-lay) Saied Méndez is a fútbol-obsessed Argentine-American, Picture Book, Middle Grade, and Young Adult author.

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As an educator, as a teacher librarian, all the children in any given school in any given year enter your classroom, the school library. They arrive from an assortment of families, economic conditions, ethnic and racial backgrounds with a range of personalities and potential. They are all beautiful, important and of immeasurable value.

Depending on the community in which they live, some of them for reasons of physical characteristics, language, clothing, cultural or religious practices feel as though they don't belong. They are asked questions they are unable to answer to the satisfaction of other children or adults. Where Are You From? ( Harper, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, June 4, 2019) written by Yamile Saied Mendez with illustrations by Jaime Kim gives readers the best and only responses of true worth.

Where are you from?
they ask.
A little girl is questioned by her classmates. Adults want to know if her parents are from here or from there. When her reply prompts them to continue to question her, she is confused. She decides to ask her grandfather, her Abuelo,

because he knows everything.

Walking together with his granddaughter, Abuelo stops for a moment to think. He tells her she comes from the Pampas, the gaucho and the brown river. He further describes the meaning and value of each geographical feature and person. He continues this journey by taking her to mountain peaks and oceans painting pictures with his words of the flora and fauna dwelling there.

She also is a part of wild unexpected weather found in this portion of the world as well as the calmer ebb and flow of sunshine and rain. Each sentence from Abuelo to his beloved little girl speaks of the land and the people and the histories attached to both. The child, like those who questioned her, wants more. She needs a specific place.

His response is certain to cause gasps in all readers. Without a doubt, his granddaughter stops for a moment as joy and warmth fill her soul. As Abuelo takes her home and holds her close, he speaks of universal, timeless beliefs which will resonate with all of us.

There is not a child (or an adult) who reads the words written byYamile Saied Mendez that will not feel a connection. The desire to know who came before us in our families is strong but even more urgent when others press us for answers other than those we know. Abuelo's descriptions are lyrical and simply lovely; almost like a lullaby. Through his words we walk through all aspects of a land, its inhabitants and the history of its people. Each of these portrayals, like layers, are designed to lead us back to the girl's original question. This makes Abuelo's final words more potent. Here is a passage.

You're from mountains so high
they tickle Senor Cielo's belly,
where the condor roosts his family
and the jaguar prowls the night.
In a word the image seen on the open and matching dust jacket and book case is bliss. You can see the shared pleasure in each other's company on both faces. The path through the field with birds against the afternoon sky contributes to the golden emotional glow. The field stretches over the spine to the far-left edge. There are color variations in the grass as if a gentle breeze is blowing. Even more birds in the same flock are shown flying. On the jacket the title text, the child and her grandfather are varnished.

On the opening and closing endpapers a vista of mountains and an ocean spreads edge to edge. In the first a palette of green shades and yellow depicts the start of a day with the large sun rising between peaks and glistening on the water. Birds are flying from both directions. On the final endpapers hues of purple color the sky, mountains and water. A darker golden yellow and orange paint the setting sun. Birds are again flying from both directions. Both scenes present serenity.

The pictures rendered in watercolor and digital techniques to create the digital illustrations by are brimming with animation. The sizes move from full-page pictures to double-page pictures when the little girl is chatting with Abuelo. With each page turn you can sense the mood and emotions intensifying by Jaime Kim's use of color.

To enrich the warmth of the narrative Jaime Kim alters her points of view. Sometimes the pair are viewed close-up or as part of a larger landscape. Their attire might change depending on the sentences. They are seen riding horses and wearing appropriate attire when gaucho is mentioned. Sometimes the reader is given more of a bird's eye view of a scene as in the plaza with reference to Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. Readers will finally notice the sky changing color as dusk descends on the pair. This enhances the final sentences and the final image.

One of my many, many favorite illustrations spans two pages. It is night. A few golden stars sparkle in the deep blue and purple sky. This spreads as a canvas on the two pages. Along the bottom of the page, outlined in those blue and purple colors, are grasses from the field enlarged as if we are peering through them lying on our stomachs. On the right behind some of the grass the grandfather and his granddaughter sit. Their backs are to us. They are looking up. One of Abuelo's arms is around the little girl; the other is pointing at the North Star. Simply precious.

Lovingly written by Yamile Saied Mendez and lovingly illustrated by Jaime Kim, this book, Where Are You From?, tells readers all they need to know about their origins. At the close of this title, readers will realize the human heart is a landscape large enough to include everyone. I highly recommend this book for your professional and personal collections.

To learn more about Yamile Saied Mendez and Jaime Kim and their other work, please visit their websites by following the links attached to their names. Yamile Saied Mendez has an account on . Jaime Kim has an account on and . At the publisher's website you can view interior images from the beginning of the book. There is also a printable activity, a family tree to complete. Here is a link to a letter written by Yamile Saied Mendez about this book.

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As an educator, as a teacher librarian, all the children in any given school in any given year enter your classroom, the school library. They arrive from an assortment of families, economic conditions, ethnic and racial backgrounds with a range of personalities and potential. They are all beautiful, important and of immeasurable value.

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Where Are You From? - Yamile Saied Méndez - Hardcover

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by Yamile Saied Méndez

illustrated by Jaime Kim

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illustrated by Jaime Kim

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" Lyrical language and luminous illustrations. An ideal vehicle for readers to ponder and discuss their own identities." -Kirkus (starred review)
"An enchanted, hand-in-hand odyssey [and] opportunity to acknowledge and celebrate the many, many backgrounds, roots, histories, of those who live in these United States." -Shelf Awareness "A much-needed title that is a first purchase for libraries and classrooms." -School Library Journal "This touching book addresses a ubiquitous question for children of color, and in the end, the closeness between the girl and Abuelo shows that no matter the questions, she knows exactly where she's from." -Booklist "Although the book begins as a gentle riposte to narrow cultural and ethnic categorizations, its conclusion reaches out to all readers, evoking both heritage and the human family." -Publishers Weekly (starred review)
This resonant picture book tells the story of one girl who constantly gets asked a simple question that doesn't have a simple answer. A great conversation starter in the home or classroom-a book to share, in the spirit of I Am Enough by Grace Byers and Keturah A. Bobo.

When a girl is asked where she's from-where she's really from-none of her answers seems to be the right one.
Where am I from? You're from hurricanes and dark storms, and a tiny singing frog that calls the island people home when the sun goes to sleep....
Unsure about how to reply, she turns to her loving abuelo for help. He doesn't give her the response she expects. She gets an even better one.

With themes of self-acceptance, identity, and home, this powerful, lyrical picture book will resonate with readers young and old, from all backgrounds and of all colors-especially anyone who ever felt that they don't belong.

A Spanish-language edition, ¿De dónde eres?, is also available.

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Where Are You From? - Yamile Saied Méndez - Hardcover

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Where Are You From? - Yamile Saied Méndez - Hardcover Skip to content by Yamile Saied Méndez illustrated by Jaime Kim Spend $49 and get FREE shipping on HC.com + See More U.S. & International Retailers by Yamile Saied Méndez illustrated by Jaime Kim We'd love you to buy this book, and hope you find this page convenient in locating a place of purchase.

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Reviewed by Romy Natalia Goldberg

Description of the book:

"Where are you from? they ask." A young girl's confidence is shaken after increasingly persistent questioning from her peers, teachers and friends' parents. She turns to Abuelo, her loving grandfather, for answers. "Where am I from?" she asks, knowing he has faced these questions before. Abuelo answers by describing with lyrical beauty her parents' places of origin. As he speaks, the landscapes around them morph, from the Pampas and Andean peaks of Argentina to the coastline and rainforests of Puerto Rico. But this immersive journey is not powerful enough to quell the doubts instilled by her peers. Echoing their questioning, she insists, "where am I really from?" At this, Abuelo points to his heart. She comes from her family's love. As he continues, they are joined by a large, joyful family. The sun begins to set as her doubts settle. Surrounded by their unquestioning love, bathed in the light of the afterglow, she is newly confident.

Released simultaneously in English and Spanish, WHERE ARE YOU FROM? joins a slate of high quality Latinx books dealing with identity and belonging. Additionally, it is one of very few picture books depicting Latinx characters from the Southern Cone.

"Where are you from?" The question implies a progression - where did you begin and where are you going? Though often asked out of sheer curiosity, many times it is a loaded question, one whose answer can be used to justify exclusion and discrimination. The girl's declaration that she is "from here, from today, same as everyone else" is a request to be treated as an equal, as someone who belongs. Once this request is ignored, she retreats to the family that created her, that asks her to justify nothing. The luminous landscapes with skies full of birds and stars suggest the limitless possibilities Abuelo wants for his granddaughter. Though the soaring landscapes could have felt overwhelming, they exude warmth and reassurance. As educators and parents, is this not how we want our kids to feel?

WHERE ARE YOU FROM? could easily have opened with a scene of overt bullying. Instead, the author and illustrator create a more nuanced scenario. The girl is being questioned by a diverse group of kids and adults, all with facial expressions that range from neutral to kind.

By eliminating a stereotypical "villain," WHERE ARE YOU FROM offers a more realistic depiction of microaggressions endured by children of color (and children with other noticeable differences, such as accented speech).

One of the things I appreciate the most about this book is that we never circle back to the people who questioned the main character at the start. This is an excellent example of what happens when an "own voices" author is allowed to write from their experience. As adult readers, we know the girl will be asked "where are you from?" countless times and ways throughout her life due to the color of her skin. We know that, for some people, her answers will never be right or good enough. By allowing the girl to find an emotional resolution entirely within the context of her support system, WHERE ARE YOU FROM? sends young readers a powerful message: you do not have to justify your existence to others.

For children of mixed heritage, the question "where are you from?" has the power to generate an additional level of self-doubt. A few spreads into the girl's journey with Abuelo, readers are lulled into the sense that they know where she is from. When Abuelo takes us from Argentina to Puerto Rico we are challenged to open our minds. Like many children, she is not "from" a single place. Rather than simplify (or flatten, or erase) her heritage, WHERE ARE YOU FROM? invites readers to accept the main character's complex heritage as something that is beautiful to behold.
Teaching Tips
WHERE ARE YOU FROM? can be used as a prompt for students to explore their heritage. This could be done exclusively as a writing exercise or could incorporate art in the form of illustrations or collage/printed images. Additionally, students could choose who they would like to go on their journey with - would they want to travel through space and time with a family member, as the girl in this book does? Or would they rather choose a historical figure as their guide?

WHERE ARE YOU FROM? naturally lends itself to a nuanced discussion of microaggressions. Students could be prompted to discuss whether they believe the main character's peers are questioning her out of curiosity or malice. Does that change the effect their constant questioning has on the girl? Do they even have the right to ask this question? And what does it mean that no one was willing to accept the girl's original answer? However, educators should take care to ensure class discussions do not put undue burden on students of color to share personal experiences of mistreatment.

WHERE ARE YOU FROM? can be a starting point for learning about two very different parts of the Americas. Lessons for younger students could focus on the eco-systems of both regions. Older students can tackle heavier subjects alluded to in the final spreads for each location: the history of colonialism and slavery in Puerto Rico and the human rights abuses of Argentina's military dictatorship. Lessons on Puerto Rico should also touch on the territory's relationship to the rest of the United States and Latin America. Like the protagonist, Puerto Rico has a multifaceted background.

Additionally, the vivid verbs featured in WHERE ARE YOU FROM? could be incorporated into a lesson on synonyms and/or creative writing.

About the author: Yamile Saied Méndez is an Argentine-American who lives in Utah with her Puerto Rican husband and their five kids. An inaugural Walter Dean Myers Grant recipient, she's also a graduate of Voices of Our Nations ( VONA) and the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA Writing for Children's and Young Adult program. In this blog post from 2017, she shares with our readers what it was like to study for her MFA. Much has happened since then. Yamille is now a PB, MG, and YA author, and is also part of Las Musas, the first collective of women and nonbinary Latinx MG and YA authors. To learn more, visit Yamile's website.

About the reviewer: Romy Natalia Goldberg is a Paraguayan-American travel and kid lit author with a love for stories about culture and communication. Her guidebook to Paraguay, OTHER PLACES TRAVEL GUIDE TO PARAGUAY, was published in 2012 and 2017 and led to work with "Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown," and The Guardian. She is an active SCBWI member and co-runs Kidlit Latinx, a Facebook support group for Latinx children's book authors and illustrators.

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Where Are You From? by Yamile Saied Méndez

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Reviewed by Romy Natalia Goldberg Description of the book: "Where are you from? they ask." A young girl's confidence is shaken after increasingly persistent questioning from her peers, teachers and friends' parents. She turns to Abuelo, her loving grandfather, for answers. "Where am I from?" she asks, knowing he has faced these questions before....

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When we bring him home to Abuela, she says, "¡ Un loro!"- a parrot! We name him Mango, because his wings are green, orange, and gold, like the fruit.

During the day, Abuela teaches him how to give beaky kisses and to bob his head when she sings "Los Pollitos" to him.

" Buenas tardes, Mango," Abuela says, opening his cage door when I get home from school.

"Good afternoon," I say, and give him a seed. Soon Mango calls to me even before we open his cage.

"¡ Buenas tardes!" he says when I open the door. "Good afternoon!"

Abuela, Mango, and I practice new words every day. Mi español gets faster, and Abuela and Mango learn the days of the week, all the months of the year, and the names of coins.

"How did he learn all that?" Papi asks when we show him all that Mango can do. Abuela winks at me and gives Mango a piece of banana, peel and all.

"Practice," she says.

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When we bring him home to Abuela, she says, "¡ Un loro!"- a parrot! We name him Mango, because his wings are green, orange, and gold, like the fruit. During the day, Abuela teaches him how to give beaky kisses and to bob his head when she sings "Los Pollitos" to him.

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La abuela "lejana" de Mia deja su casa, rodeada de sol, palmeras y loros, para ir a vivir con Mia y sus padres a la ciudad. La primera noche, cuando Mia comparte con ella su cuento favorito a la hora de dormir, descubre que la abuela no entiende inglés.

Mia la ayuda con el inglés y a la vez ella aprende algunas palabras en español. Pero la abuela no conoce suficientes palabras en inglés para compartir las historias de familia con su nieta. Un día, Mia ve un loro en el escaparate de una tienda de mascotas y descubre la manera de ayudar a su abuela.

Una tierna historia de este galardonado dúo sobre el amor, la comprensión y la importancia de hacer nuevos amigos en cualquier idioma.

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Mango, Abuela y Yo, translated by Teresa Mlawer

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La abuela "lejana" de Mia deja su casa, rodeada de sol, palmeras y loros, para ir a vivir con Mia y sus padres a la ciudad.

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Biography

Meg Medina is an award-winning Cuban American author who writes picture books, middle grade stories, and YA fiction.

Medina's middle grade book, Merci Suárez Changes Gears, won the 2019 Newbery Medal. She is the 2016 recipient of the Pura Belpré honor medal for her picture book, Mango, Abuela and Me, and the 2014 Pura Belpré Award winner for her young adult novel, Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass, which was also the winner of the 2013 CYBILS Fiction award and the International Latino Book Award. Medina is also the 2012 Ezra Jack Keats New Writers medal winner for her picture book Tía Isa Wants a Car.

Meg's other books are The Girl Who Could Silence the Wind , a 2012 Bank Street Best Book and CBI Recommended Read in the UK; and Milagros: Girl from Away.

Meg's work examines how cultures intersect, as seen through the eyes of young people. She brings to audiences stories that speak to both what is unique in Latino culture and to the qualities that are universal. Her favorite protagonists are strong girls.

In March 2014, she was recognized as one of the CNN 10 Visionary Women in America. In November 2014, she was named one of Latino Stories Top Ten Latino Authors to Watch.

When she is not writing, Meg works on community projects that support girls, Latino youth and/or literacy. She lives with her family in Richmond, Virginia.

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A video interview with Meg Medina | Reading Rockets

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Meg Medina is an award-winning Cuban American author who writes picture books, middle grade stories, and YA fiction. Her picture books include Tía Isa Wants a Car and Mango, Abuela, and Me, winner of the 2016 Pura Belpré Honor Award. Her middle grade book, Merci Suárez Changes Gears, won the 2019 Newbery Medal.

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I'm Your Neighbor Books: Immigration Children's Literature

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Mango, Abuela, and Me
By Meg Medina
Illustrated by Angela Dominguez
Published by Candlewick Press
Ages 5 and up

A 2016 Pura Belpré Author Award Honor Book
A 2016 Pura Belpré Illustrator Award Honor Book

Description
When a little girl's far-away grandmother comes to stay, love and patience transcend language in a tender story written by acclaimed author Meg Medina.

Mia's abuela has left her sunny house with parrots and palm trees to live with Mia and her parents in the city. The night she arrives, Mia tries to share her favorite book with Abuela before they go to sleep and discovers that Abuela can't read the words inside. So while they cook, Mia helps Abuela learn English ("Dough. Masa"), and Mia learns some Spanish too, but it's still hard for Abuela to learn the words she needs to tell Mia all her stories. Then Mia sees a parrot in the pet-shop window and has the perfectoidea for how to help them all communicate a little better. An endearing tale from an award-winning duo that speaks loud and clear about learning new things and the love that bonds family members.

Reviews & Accolades
"The text is not bilingual line by line-instead Medina artfully weaves a few Spanish words and phrases into her mainly English sentences in a way young Latinos take for granted, and most English speakers should understand...Dominguez's appealing illustrations, in tones of mango and papaya blended with a more gray and brown urban palette, capture a realistic trace of sadness and confusion on Abuela's face amid cheerful scenes of comfortable family life."
- The New York Times Book Review

"Abuela has left her house in a sunnier place and moved to the wintry city to live with Mia and her family in their small apartment. Even though Mia and Abuela share a room, the older woman still feels like a "far-away grandmother" because her English is "too poquito" for Mia to speak with her. But Mia won't give up; embracing the role of teacher and enlisting the help of a bilingual pet parrot (the "Mango" in the title) she and Abuela are soon "full of things to say." With its emotional nuance and understated, observant narration-especially where Abuela's inner state is concerned-Medina's (Tia Isa Wants a Car) lovely story has the feel of a novella. Dominguez's (Knit Together) broader, more cartoonlike art initially seems like a mismatch, but she captures the doubt in Abuela's eyes, and her sunny colors and simple characterizations keep the story from sinking into melancholy before it bounces back to its upbeat ending. A Spanish-language edition is available simultaneously."
- Publishers Weekly

"Mia is a happy little girl who is excited when her Grandmother, Abuela, comes to live with them. But Mia has a big surprise: Abuela cannot speak English, and Mia does not know enough Spanish to talk to her. Sadly, all the two of them can do is watch television-not a very interesting activity. So they try to teach each other their language, using repetition, pointing at objects, and placing "word cards" around the house. Things are not progressing very well until Mia spies a parrot for sale in the local pet shop. Soon the parrot is installed in their home and begins speaking both Spanish and English words to the delight of Mia and Abuela. In no time the parrot becomes the medium for their mutual understanding. Abuela is able to share her stories of home, a sunny place with mango and palm trees and rivers running nearby; and Mia is able to tell Abuela all about herself and how she can run as fast as the boys can. The story is told in first person, present tense by Mia. The sprinkling of Spanish words throughout the text will benefit readers with knowledge of Spanish. The illustrations, many of which are full-page, contain strong, rich colors and bold, thick strokes. This charming story of learning how to communicate and understanding each person's unique story is likely to please little ones, especially those with a Hispanic background."
- Children's Literature

"Mia is unsure of what to think when her grandma, Abuela, comes to live with her. She must open up her room to share with Abuela, even though the two don't even share a common language. "Abuela and I can't understand each other" Mia confides to her mom. "Things will get better," she tells her, and indeed they do. Through some trial and error, persistence and even a feathered friend, Mia and Abuela find new ways to communicate. "Now, when Abuela and I are lying next to each other in bed, our mouths are full of things to say." I n this tale, Medina blends Spanish and English words together as seamlessly as she blends the stories of two distinct cultures and generations. Dominguez's bright illustrations, done in ink, gouache, and marker, make the characters shine as bright as the rich story they depict. The glowing images of Mango, the parrot, a nearly silent star of the book, will win over audiences of all ages but the real magic is in the heartfelt tale of love. Everything about this book will make readers want to share it with someone they love. VERDICT A timeless story with wide appeal."
- School Library Journal

"Abuela is coming to stay with Mia and her parents. But how will they communicate if Mia speaks little Spanish and Abuela, little English? Could it be that a parrot named Mango is the solution? The measured, evocative text describes how Mia's español is not good enough to tell Abuela the things a grandmother should know. And Abuela's English is too poquito to tell Mia all the stories a granddaughter wants to hear. Mia sets out to teach her Abuela English. A red feather Abuela has brought with her to remind her of a wild parrot that roosted in her mango trees back home gives Mia an idea. She and her mother buy a parrot they name Mango. And as Abuela and Mia teach Mango, and each other, to speak both Spanish and English, their "mouths [fill] with things to say." The accompanying illustrations are charmingly executed in ink, gouache, and marker, "with a sprinkling of digital magic." They depict a cheery urban neighborhood and a comfortable, small apartment. Readers from multigenerational immigrant families will recognize the all-too-familiar language barrier. They will also cheer for the warm and loving relationship between Abuela and Mia, which is evident in both text and illustrations even as the characters struggle to understand each other. A Spanish-language edition, Mango, Abuela, y yo, gracefully translated by Teresa Mlawer, publishes simultaneously. This warm family story is a splendid showcase for the combined talents of Medina, a Pura Belpré award winner, and Dominguez, an honoree."
- Kirkus Reviews

Groups Represented
Latinx

Theme: #OwnVoices
Theme: Bilingual
Theme: Family Relationships
Theme: Grandparents & Intergenerational
Theme: Learning English

Setting
United States
Engagement Projects & Resources
Share with us how you use the book! Leave a comment!

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Mango, Abuela, and M e By Meg Medina Illustrated by Angela Dominguez Published by Candlewick Press Ages 5 and up A 2016 Pura Belpré Author Award Honor Book A 2016 Pura Belpré Illustrator Award Honor Book Description When a little girl's far-away grandmother comes to stay, love and patience transcend language in a tender story written by acclaimed author Meg Medina.

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Printer-friendly version

(GLCs:

Mango, Abuela, and Me

Last updated Saturday, February 4, 2017

Author: Meg Medina
Illustrator: Angela Dominguez
Date of Publication:
ISBN: 0763669008
Grade Level: 2nd Click here for grade level guidelines.)
Date(s) Used: Feb. 2017

Synopsis: Mia's abuela has left her sunny house with parrots and palm trees to live with Mia and her parents in the city. The night she arrives, Mia tries to share her favorite book with Abuela before they go to sleep and discovers that Abuela can't read the words inside. So while they cook, Mia helps Abuela learn English ("Dough. Masa"), and Mia learns some Spanish too, but it's still hard for Abuela to learn the words she needs to tell Mia all her stories. Then Mia sees a parrot in the pet-shop window and has the perfect idea for how to help them all communicate a little better.

Note to readers:

*

There are a few Spanish words in this story. If you are unsure about the pronunciation, you might want to check with other volunteers before the reading clubs start.

Discussion topics for before reading:

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Who is Mango?

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Who are the other people on the cover?

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Have you ever seen a parrot? Do you know anyone with a parrot for a pet?

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Do you have any pets?

Vocabulary

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poquito - little

Discussion topics for during/after reading:

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Who is Edmund?

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Who is "Tu abuelo"? (Mia's grandfather)

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How did the kids in class help their new classmate Kim?

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Why did Abuela and Mia name the parrot Mango? (he is green, orange, and gold, like the fruit)

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How did Mango learn so many words?

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What are some things you could do to help someone learn a new language?

*Note: These craft ideas are just suggestions. You can use them, but you don't have to use them. You can expand upon them, or add your own twist. Remember, though, that the focus of your time should not be on the development and execution of a craft; the focus should be on the read-aloud and the enjoyment of the book!

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Reading to Kids Books: Mango, Abuela, and Me

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Reading to Kids is a grassroots organization dedicated to inspiring underserved children with a love of reading, thereby enriching their lives and opportunities for future success. Reading to Kids currently works with Gratts, Magnolia, Esperanza, Los Angeles, Politi, White, Alta Loma, and MacArthur Park Elementary Schools (located in Los Angeles, California) to support monthly, school-sponsored Saturday reading clubs.

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author: Meg Medina

translator (Spanish version): Teresa Mlawer

illustrator: Angela Domínguez

Young Mia has a problem-her Spanish-speaking abuela has just arrived from the countryside to live with her and her family; and Mia, who speaks English only, cannot communicate as quickly and effectively as she wants to. Which means that, although the two are developing a warm, loving relationship, the bedtime stories Mia wants to hear will just have to wait. Mia, in her exuberance, has an idea that sort of works: she attaches English labels to everything in sight-even her pet hamster's cage-and a the two play "hear and say." And, as they go about their daily activities, Abuela teaches her some Spanish words as well. A slow process for a little girl, with limited success.

But wait! Abuela has brought with her a red feather, dropped by a wild parrot who lived in her mango tree back home-and Mia has an idea that just might work! Convincing her mom to purchase a parrot they meet in a pet store-whom they name "Mango"-soon results in a close relationship becoming even closer and a newfound almost-bilingualism in the household.

Domínguez's artwork, rendered in a blend of ink, gouache, and marker-"with a sprinkling of digital magic"-is perfect. The warm and vibrant colors, on a palette of mostly pinks, blues, yellows and oranges, complement the warmth of the story; and, unlike too many picture books that feature Latina/o characters, Domínguez varies the skin tones to reflect those of a real family. I especially like the illustration of a bemused Papi in the background, scratching his head, while Abuela offers a piece of banana to Mango, and the three-Abuela, Mia, and Mango-happily chatter away in Spanish, English and Squawk-ish.

Athough Abuela's little house, the seashore, palm trees and parrots hint at the Cuban countryside, Medina chose not to specify where she comes from. "For very young children," she told me, "I like to offer them what feels familiar-a city, Abuela's town, the pet shop, the school. I think that leaving room for the child's imagination allows her to place herself more easily in the story."

Mlawer's outstanding translation (in the Spanish version) is idiomatic and warm, capturing the nuances of the story and setting, and of how this particular family speaks and feels. For instance, "She comes to us in winter, leaving behind her sunny house that rested between two snaking rivers" becomes, "Ella llega en invierno, dejando atrás su casa soleada que descansa entre dos ríos zigzagueantes." When Papi tells Mia, "Abuela belongs with us now," in Spanish it becomes, "Ahora el lugar de Abuela está con nosotros."

This understated, evocative little story of patience and love, intergenerational relationships, bilingual language learning, and adapting to change, is a treasure that will resonate with the youngest listeners, who will want to hear it again and again. Mango, Abuela and Me // Mango, Abuela y Yo is highly recommended.

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De Colores: The Raza Experience in Books for Children

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author: Meg Medina translator (Spanish version): Teresa Mlawer illustrator: Angela Domínguez Young Mia has a problem-her Spanish-speaking abuela has just arrived from the countryside to live with her and her family; and Mia, who speaks English only, cannot communicate as quickly and effectively as she wants to.

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A website devoted to children's book author and illustrator Angela Dominguez. Enjoy!

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author: Meg Medina
illustrator: Angela Dominguez

Mia's abuela has left her sunny house with parrots and palm trees to live with Mia and her parents in the city. The night she arrives, Mia tries to share her favorite book with Abuela before they go to sleep and discovers that Abuela can't read the words inside. So while they cook, Mia helps Abuela learn English ("Dough. Masa"), and Mia learns some Spanish too, but it's still hard for Abuela to learn the words she needs to tell Mia all her stories. Then Mia sees a parrot in the pet-shop window and has the perfecto idea for how to help them all communicate a little better. An endearing tale from an award-winning duo that speaks loud and clear about learning new things and the love that bonds family members.

A 2016 Pura Belpré Author Award Honor Book
A 2016 Pura Belpré Illustrator Award Honor Book

When a little girl's far-away grandmother comes to stay, love and patience transcend language in a tender story written by acclaimed author Meg Medina.

suggested retail price (U.S./CAN):
$15.99 / $21.99

isbn-10/isbn-13:
0763669008 / 9780763669003

on sale date:
08/2015

type/format:
Picture Books / Hardback

age range:
5 yrs - 8 yrs

# of pages/size:
32 / 9 1/16" x 10 5/8"

grade range:
Kindergarten - Grade 3

subjects:
Fiction; Animals; Concepts; Family; Social Issues;

author's comments:
Meg Medina is the author of the Newbery Medal–winning book Merci Suárez Changes Gears, which was also a 2018 Kirkus Prize finalist. Her young adult novels include Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass, which won the 2014 Pura Belpré Author Award; Burn Baby Burn, which was long-listed for the National Book Award; and The Girl Who Could Silence the Wind. She is also the author of picture books Mango, Abuela, and Me, illustrated by Angela Dominguez, which was a Pura Belpré Author Award Honor Book, and Tía Isa Wants a Car, illustrated by Claudio Muñoz, which won the Ezra Jack Keats New Writer Award. The daughter of Cuban immigrants, she grew up in Queens, New York, and now lives in Richmond, Virginia.

illustrator's comments:
Angela Dominguez has created many picture books, including Maria Had a Little Llama, for which she received a Pura Belpre Honor for illustration. She also teaches art at the Academy of Art University. She lives in San Francisco.

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author: Meg Medina illustrator: Angela Dominguez Mia's abuela has left her sunny house with parrots and palm trees to live with Mia and her parents in the city. The night she arrives, Mia tries to share her favorite book with Abuela before they go to sleep and discovers that Abuela can't read the words inside.

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Association for Library Service to Children

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Juana Martinez-Neal 2019 Caldecott Honor Reaction Video

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The first time I saw Juana Martinez-Neal's Alma and How She Got Her Name was as a thumbnail image on a website alongside scores of other books.

The first time I saw Juana Martinez-Neal's Alma and How She Got Her Name was as a thumbnail image on a website alongside scores of other books. Even in low-resolution, postage-stamp size, I felt its softness and personalness, and I wanted to reach in and hold it. The cover - featuring Alma's name spelled out in large hand-lettering, as well as Alma herself in gently blurred graphite edges and rosy-colored pencil stripes - gives off a creaminess that feels both nostalgic and new. The mood established carries throughout. Alma's story is soft, in some ways unfolding all from the safety of her father's lap in a cozy living room, and it is personal - a story of her dawning identity and how it is shaped by the things she loves and longs for and believes in and the people who have come before her.

The next time I saw Alma was when my own copy arrived, and I got a better look at Alma on the cover, holding a pencil, appearing to have just finished writing the title; this is her story. By peeking underneath the jacket onto the board, I found a similar image of Alma, but this time in grayscale, framed as a photograph, already captured in memory. This casual weaving of the present with the past sets the tone for how Martinez-Neal pictorially depicts a story that belongs both to Alma and her ancestors.

The media of graphite and colored pencil work to underscore Alma's agency throughout the book. We see her as a writer through her own handwriting and as an artist in the depictions of her own graphite drawings. It didn't take longer than the first spread, where I was introduced to Alma Sofia Esperanza José Pura Candela and the problem of her too-long name, to notice Alma's excellence of presentation in recognition of a child audience. Using penciled lettering that appears to be Alma's, the illustration shows how two pieces of paper taped together can barely fit Alma's full name. When I later showed this book to students, one exclaimed in sympathy, "Are you kidding me? Two sheets?!"

Martinez-Neal uses every jot and every smudge of graphite to create emotion-filled spreads that are rich with meaning. One of the ways she does this is through eye contact. It is hard to miss the bird with whom Alma shares eye contact on the cover, who then follows her through each spread, sharing her story. When Alma's father offers to tell Alma the story of her name, their eyes meet. When he begins to guide Alma through a photo album and share the stories of Alma's namesakes, we see Alma connecting with her ancestors through eye contact as well. These private connections, which are never mentioned in the text, point to Martinez-Neal's exceptional ability to delineate plot, theme, and characters through her pictures. An example of this comes in a spread in which Alma's father shows her a picture of Esperanza, Alma's great-grandmother, who had always longed to travel. The verso and recto appear to hold separate scenes, one with Alma and her father and one with Esperanza, but the reader can see Alma peering curiously across the gutter at Esperanza, who leans forward out of the static photograph to lock eyes and share a subtle smile with Alma.

The next spread features Alma, amidst some of Esperanza's belongings, mapping out all the places she'd like to visit. The text here reads, "I am Esperanza" - with Esperanza's name fanned out in lettering used only for her. These separate custom-designed fonts for each character are an integral part of the visual narrative and one of the most distinctive elements of the book's illustrations. The repetition of this visual component reinforces the individuality of each character in a clear, strong way.

The next time I saw Alma was with a classroom full of first graders. "The PINK is for the NOW people and the BLUE is for the DEAD people!" one student enthusiastically discovered, as he noticed the meaning imbued in the two-color aesthetic. The reader is continually invited to associate pink with Alma - her font, her bird, her jasmine flowers, her string - as her story unfolds in the here and now. At the same time, the reader is invited to associate blue with the past - the color of the lettering, Esperanza's trunk, Pura's cloak, Candela's striped pants. This visual approach puts children in the driver's seat, exemplifying Alma's respect for children's ability to understand, appreciate, and make meaning of what they see.

Finally, I had the chance to read Alma with my own daughter - with her in my lap, like Alma in her father's lap. When we reached the end and saw the author photo of Juana Martinez-Neal as a child, eyes peering to the side as if to make contact with a tiny bird, my daughter gasped, "Alma really did write this story!" I can imagine the Caldecott committee gasping in much the same way as they take in this quietly enchanting book and the singular visual experience it offers to children.

[Read the Horn Book Magazine review of Alma here.]

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Calling Caldecott | Alma and How She Got Her Name

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The first time I saw Juana Martinez-Neal's Alma and How She Got Her Name was as a thumbnail image on a website alongside scores of other books. The first time I saw Juana Martinez-Neal's Alma and How She Got Her Name was as a thumbnail image on a website alongside scores of other books.

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Juana Martinez-Neal, the recipient of the 2018 Pura Belpré Award for illustration, has a new book and it's one that sure to inspire kids to ask about the stories behind their names.

From Juana Martinez-Neal's Alma and How She Got Her Name (Candlewick, 2018). With permission of the publisher.

It's said there's a story behind every name and Alma Sofia Esperanza José Pura Candela is surely a moniker worthy of six tales. After complaining that her name is so long that it "never fits," the girl's father shares remembrances with her about the people she's been named after in First, congratulations on winning the Pura Belpr é At a recent gathering, you mentioned that you originally planned to be a painter, then illustrator. What led you to children's book illustration? Award. What an honor! Tell us about the inspiration for Alma. Alma and How She Got Her Name speaks to pride of family, heritage, and individuality, and as such, to every child. I love how your choices for her namesakes-a book lover, an artist, an activist, and a deeply spiritual woman, among others-create a whole, fully engaged individual, albeit a young one. (Candlewick, Apr.2018; PreS-Gr 2). It's the first book that Juana Martinez-Neal, the recipient of the 2018 Pura Belpré Award for illustration, has both authored and illustrated, and it's a title that is sure to inspire children to tell-or ask about-their own stories. A hardcover edition of the book in Spanish will be released simultaneously by Candlewick. The palette in Alma is limited when compared to some of the other books you have illustrated including Susan M. Elya's La Princesa and the Pea and her La Madre Goose There are so many creative flourishes in the book. The distinct hand lettering of each of the child's six names, hints to the country of your birth in the art, and so on. Did these find their way into the book consciously or unconsciously? (both Putnam), yet it contributes to the storytelling on so many levels. Can you speak to your artistic choice? This is the first book you authored. Will there be another?
Thank you, Daryl! It is a huge honor! It was completely unexpected and a total surprise. So much so that I had to watch the webcast to make sure what or IF I had won. I was embarrassed to have to call the Pura Belpré Committee back just to ask what exactly I had won.

I have always been an illustrator. I just didn't know it then or know the name of what I loved doing. The career of illustration was almost nonexistent in Peru-where I was born and raised. If someone had a way of drawing illustratively, I feel they were pushed to become a cartoonist, which did not interest me. Unfortunately, there was a very narrow view of the profession and what you could do if you had a talent for illustrating. Yet, my work always felt young even when I was painting personal pieces. My heart was and has always been there. Later, when I moved to the United States, and had children of my own, I finally figured out that I could make a living as a children's book illustrator.

[Growing up}, ...the stories of relatives were part of our lives-regardless if [these individuals] were alive or if they were with us in spirit. Those stories shaped me and were always with me. Making Alma was the most natural transition to bookmaking. In the book, I get to tell the stories I heard growing up and the story of Alma as well. Alma is this very special little girl who has a little bit of every relative who came before her, yet gets room to become whoever she wants to be.

Yes, we are so many different things at the same time. Even more so children who are discovering who they are while they start to engage with the world and find their place. As parents, we see who our children might become, but need to step back-much like Alma's father does-and leave room for them to discover their own identity.

La Madre Goose is a rhyming book for the very young. It was important to use lots of vibrant colors with all of the various characters. In La Princesa and the Pea, I wanted to use the red from the indigenous people from Huilloc (Cusco). I wanted a vibrant, red book. In Alma, I wanted the feel of an old family photo album. Most of those old photos are sepia and black-and-white so it was a deliberate, easy choice. Adding the pink and blue to the work was a way to differentiate between the story that is happening in the present, and the old photos placed in the album.

I have a fascination for typography and how much is communicated through words and how they are designed. Early on, I knew I would draw each of relative's names in a special handwritten type. I wanted the style of each of the name in Alma to help me tell the story of each relative. You'll see many of my books include handwritten type. Sometimes the text doesn't find its way into final book. With Alma, I could include hand lettering and lots of details in maps, books, and the mural that Alma painted in her room. Look for these throughout the book!

I'm happy to say YES! A second book as an author-illustrator will follow, and will also be published by Candlewick! SLJ's starred review of Alma and How She Got Her Name can be found here.

Candela! With permission of the publisher

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What's in a Name? A Conversation With Juana Martinez-Neal

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Juana Martinez-Neal, the recipient of the 2018 Pura Belpré Award for illustration, has a new book and it's one that sure to inspire kids to ask about the stories behind their names. From Juana Martinez-Neal's Alma and How She Got Her Name (Candlewick, 2018). With permission of the publisher.

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Alma and How She Got Her Name
Written and Illustrated by Juana Martinez-Neal

Published in 2018 by Candlewick Press

ISBN 978-0-7636-9355-8

A Charlotte Huck Award for Outstanding Fiction 2019 Recommended Book
Grades PK - 3 Book Review
"Alma Sofia Esperanza José Pura Candela had a long name - too long, if you asked her." Alma complains of it to her father, saying "it never fits," showing him the paper she has had to tape an extension onto in order to write out her full name. Her father proceeds to tell her stories of the five relatives after whom she is named, instructing her: "Then you decide if it fits." Alma and her Daddy sit in an armchair, looking at family photographs - as each relative is described, images related to the relative's story appear in the illustrations, connecting the family members across time. Throughout the book, graphite and colored pencil images create soft portraits, while accents of red and blue highlight Alma and key family artifacts. The book concludes with Daddy's discussion of her first name: "You are the first and the only Alma. You will make your own story." Pura Belpre illustrator award winner Juana Martinez-Neal offers a sweet picture book reflection on family bonds, affinities, and remembrances. Published simultaneously with a Spanish edition, this book is a wonderful resource for classroom discussion of identity, connections, and individuality.
Teaching Ideas: Invitations for Your Classroom Grades PreK - 3
Author/Illustrator Study. Juana Martinez-Neal's own name story served as inspiration for Alma's story. Explore Juana Martinez-Neal's website to learn more about her life experiences, her cultural background, and her artistic style and influences. She has been recognized with the Pura Belpre illustrator award for La Princesa and the Pea . Watch a Candlewick Press in which Juana describes the story of Alma. In an interview with Alex Dorros , Juana discusses the need for diverse voices in children's literature (this video may appeal more to teachers than students). Examine the illustrations in La Princesa and the Pea , La Madre Goose , and Alma and How She Got Her Name - invite students to describe what they notice about line, shape, color, space, and medium. Collaborate with your art teacher to offer students the opportunity to create handmade paper (a hallmark of Juana's style).

Family Stories: A Text Set. Family stories play an important role in the primary grade curriculum. Read How Alma Got Her Name as part of a text set that features diverse family structures. Consider beginning with the book Who's in My Family?: All About Our Families (see our Classroom Bookshelf entry on this text for many teaching invitations related to an exploration of families). Work with your school or local public librarian to be sure that your read an array of titles that reflect diverse family circumstances. Consult booklists such as Social Justice Books: Learning About Family Structures and the CCBC's Recommended Picture Books Featuring Multiracial Families . Some important titles to include: A Most Unusual Day by Sydra Mallery (adoption), Still a Family (homelessness) by Brenda Reeves Sturgis, Shelly Rotner's photo essay (diverse family structures), Karen Hesse's (working nights), and Bao Phi's A Different Pond (immigration) .

The People Who Inspire Us: Collecting Oral Histories. Alma can readily relate to the family members and their interests as described by her father. Ask your students to think of a person who inspires them, someone they look up to, someone they seek out for counsel and companionship (this may be a family member, a friend, a teacher, a neighbor, etc.). Students can develop interview questions to learn more about their mentor. Questions can focus on their childhood, key moments in their life, their interests and aspirations, as well as other questions identified by the students. Students in grades one through three can take notes during their interviews and then can write up a biographical sketch, including a portrait either drawn or photographed. PreK and K students can be supported to record their recollections of the interview in drawings and phonetic spellings. If you have technology available to you, it is a good idea to have students record their interviews so that they can re-listen to the interview.

What Do You Want to Be Known For? Invite your students to consider how they might be introduced to someone through a story similar to the ones told by Alma's daddy. Ask them to think about the interests, talents, and accomplishments that they want to be known for. Drawing inspiration from Juana Martinez-Neal's illustrations, students can draw a picture of themselves surrounded by artifacts that represent them - extend the activity by having students compose the story of who they are and who they want to be. Display these portraits in your classroom.

How Are We Alike? How Are We Unique? Alma's Daddy prompts her to identify connections she has with her relatives and also to consider herself as unique, with her own story to tell. Pair your students either with each other, with an older classmate, or with a community member. Use a series of questions to help structure the conversation - these questions should prompt consideration of commonalities and differences. Invite participants to record their findings on a graphic organizer. Share the book Looking Like Me, by Walter Dean Myers, in which the author and his son (who is the illustrator of the book) outline the ways that they are the same and ways in which they are individuals. Our Classroom Bookshelf entry on by Paige Britt describes another title well suited to this activity.

Names: A Text Set. Read How Alma Got Her Name as part of a text set that focuses on names. Include titles such as Kevin Henkes's classic Chrysanthemum , Helen Recovits My Name is Yoon , Karen Lynn Williams' My Name is Sangoel , and Leslea Newman's My Name is Aviva. As you read across titles like these, discuss which aspect of names is addressed in the story (for example: naming practices, character's feelings about their names, family connections). Being mindful of the varied background of students in your class, particularly of students who belong to foster and adoptive families, open a discussion of names and identity. Allow space for students to explore all aspects of names, including circumstances in which people might choose to use nicknames or change their names in order to affirm aspects of their identity (such as gender).

Visual Literacy: Reading Photographs and Portraits. Alma gets to know the relatives that her Daddy describes through his words and through photographs. Provide your students with an opportunity to practice visual literacy skills, by examining and discussing a range of photographic portraits and art . Students can examine posture, facial expression, clothing, and accompanying setting and artifacts, describing what they observe and what they think they can infer about the subject of the portrait. As an extension, invite students to create self portraits or portraits of a special person in their life (using digital photography or other mediums); they should consider how the person will be posed and what will be included in the background. Display their work in the school or in a community setting.

Duet Model Reading: The Stories That Shape Us. Pair a reading of Alma and How She Got Her Name and The Matchbox Diary, by Paul Fleischman, in a duet model reading (see our Teaching with Text Sets entry). Compare the ways that these authors use text and image to relay family stories. Extend your look at storytelling more broadly, by reading additional texts such as Dad's Camera , in which photographs are the storytelling device, or Islandborn in which different community members tell their stories about the same place. Invite your students to consider how, where, and when they tell stories and to reflect on what stories mean in their lives. For further inspiration, see Katie's professional book: Story, Still the Heart of Literacy Learning.
Further Explorations Online Resources Author/Illustrator Website: Juana Martinez-Neal
Candlewick Press Interview with Juana Martinez-Neal

Alex Dorros: Interview with Juana Martinez-Neal

Social Justice Books: Learning About Family Structures .
CCBC's Recommended Picture Books Featuring Multiracial Families Social Justice Books: Guide for Selecting Anti-Bias Children's Books National Gallery of Art: Examining Portraits Books

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The Stories That Shape Us: Teaching Ideas for Alma and How She Got Her Name - The Classroom Bookshelf

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Alma Sofia Esperanza José Pura Candela thinks her name is too long - when she tries to write it, she needs to add an extension piece of paper in order to fit it on a single page.

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Interview with Juana Martinez-Neal, creator of Alma and How She Got Her Name

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What's in a name? For one little girl, her very long name tells a vibrant story of where she came from - and who she may one day be.

In her author-illustrator debut, Juana Martinez-Neal opens a treasure box of discovery for children who may be curious about their own name or origin story.

Worth Mentioning

★ ALA Caldecott Honor 2019

★ Ezra Jack Keats Award Writer Honor 2019

★ NCTE Charlotte Huck Award for Outstanding Fiction for Children Recommended Title 2019

★ NCSS and CBC Notable Social Studies Trade Books for Young People 2019

★ ILA CLRSIG Notable Books for a Global Society 2019

★ Children's Literature Assembly Notable Children's Books in the Language Arts Award Books 2019

★ Texas Library Association 2×2 Reading List 2019

★ ALSC Notable Children's Book 2019

★ Kansas National Education Association 2019 Kansas State Reading Circle Catalog - "Best of the Best" selection

★ Illinois Monarch Award Master List 2019-2020

★ Tejas Star Reading List 2019-2020

★ We Are Kidlit Collective Summer Reading List 2019

★ Bank Street College of Education Best Children's Books of the Year 2019

★ Bank Street College of Education The Best Children's Picture Books of the Year in Spanish 2019

★ Star of the North Nominee 2019-2020

★ Great Texas Mosquito List 2019-2020 Master List

★ Cybils 2018 Fiction Picture Book Finalist

★ SLJ Best Books 2018

★ ALA Booklist Editors' Choice 2018

★ New York Public Library Best Books of 2018

★ Chicago Public Library Best Books of 2018

★ Evanston Public Library 101 Great Books for Kids 2018

★ ABA 2018 ABC Best Books for Young Readers

★ Nerdy Book Club Award Fiction Picture Book 2018

★ Bookstagram Choice Award Best Own Voice Picture Book 2018

★ Indiana Library Federation 2019 Read Alouds Too-Good-To Miss: Ageless

★ Pima County Public Library Southwest Books of the Year 2018

★ Amazon 2018 Best Books of the Year so Far

★ Kids' IndieNext TOP 10 Spring 2018

★ A Junior Library Guild Primary Spanish Selection

★ 2018 Society of Illustrators Original Art Selection

Reviews

★ Martinez-Neal's first outing as an author is a winner-her (...) pencil drawings (...) teem with emotional intimacy. It's an origin story that envelopes readers like a hug. -Starred review

Booklist:

★ Martinez-Neal brings her gentle story to life through beautiful graphite and colored pencil artwork, set against cream-colored backgrounds. Soft blue and red details pop against the charcoal scenes, which perfectly reflect the snapshots of Alma's family. While Alma feels enriched by learning her family's history, she is also empowered by the knowledge that she will give her name, Alma, its own story. -Starred review

School Library Journal:

★ The softly colored images and curvilinear shapes that embrace the figures evoke a sense of warmth and affection (...) A beautifully illustrated, tender story to be shared with all children -Starred review

Kirkus:

Mostly monochromatic against a cream background, the illustrations (...) are delightful, capturing the distinctive essences of Alma's many namesakes. A celebration of identity, family and belonging.

The Horn Book:

Throughout, grayscale print transfer illustrations have a soft visual texture, and subtle colored-pencil highlights in pinks and blues enliven each spread. The pictures end up stealing the show in their depiction of the sweet closeness between Alma and her father. They also convey a subtle, supernatural connection between Alma and her ancestors, whose images in the family photos make eye contact with her outside of her father's awareness.

The Wall Street Journal:

Like artifacts, the names that parents give children often have stories to tell. Every piece of Alma's name, she discovers, comes to her from someone in her family, and, as she and her father talk, Alma feels a new sense of connection (...) Touching on cultural themes (...) this is a tender outing for children ages 4-8.

Shelf Awareness:

With each ancestral tale, Alma enthusiastically underscores her direct connections to her familial inheritance (...) Names are so much more than a collection of letters and sounds, Martinez-Neal reminds. The book's final words, "What story would you like to tell?" become an invitation for readers to share and claim each of their own, distinctive stories, histories and identities.

Story Monsters Ink:

A great book for introducing family history and the importance of our place within it.

More Reviews

News about Alma

Publishers Weekly - Spring 2018 Children's Sneak Previews

All The Wonders - Cover Reveal of Alma

Read Brightly - 20 Must-Read Picture Books of 2018

Latinxs in KidLit - 2018 Titles By/For/About Latinx

Publishers Weekly - Children's Authors and Books to Watch for at Winter Institute 13

Youth Literature Reviews - 30 Must-Read 2018 Picture Books

Publishers Weekly - WI13: Authors and Books to Watch

Colby Sharp - Awesome 2018 Books

ABA - The Spring 2018 Kids' Indie Next List Preview

Booklist - Youth Preview Spring 2018

School Library Journal - 38 Exciting Titles Stars March 2018

School Library Journal - What's in a name? A Conversation with Juana Martinez-Neal

Amazon - Editor's Pick Ages 3-5 for April 2018

12 News - Celebrate International Children's Book Day in the Valley

Children's Book Council - April 2018 Hot Off the Press

Publishers Weekly - New Kids' and YA Books: Week of April 9, 2018

Bookpage - Meet the Illustrator Juana Martinez-neal

The Washington Post - Children's Books: The Many-Storied Past

The Horn Book - Calling Caldecott April Picture Books on the Radar

Mr. Schu - 2018 Best Books

Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast - Juana Martinez-Neal on Alma and How She Got Her Name

Let's Talk Picture Books - Juana Martinez-Neal

Let's Talk Picture Books - Juana Martinez-Neal

Children's Book Week 2018 Preview

Today's Parent - Great books featuring Characters of Colour

The News & Observer - Award-winning author wants to add more diverse voices to children's literature

The Children's Book Review - Best New Picture Books | April 2018

Scholastic - 50 Magical Books for Summer

San Francisco Chronicle - Roundup of New Children's Books

Great Kids Books - #SummerReading 2018: Preschool, TK and Kindergarten (ages 4-5)

The Globe and Mail - Spring into reading with this season's crop of children's books

International Falls Journal - Summer reading is heating up at library

The Children's Book Review - Illustration Inspiration: Juana Martinez-Neal, Illustrator Of Alma And How She Got Her Name

Anti-Defamation League - Anti-Bias Education: Alma and How She Got Her Name

Amazon - Best Children's Books of 2018 So Far, Ages 3 - 5

New York Public Library - New & Noteworthy: 2018 Picture Books We Love

Mr. Schu - Ten Not-to-be-Missed Picture Books Published in 2018 #PB10FOR10

Parents Magazine - Celebrating Diversity Through Books

American Booksellers Association - 2018 ABC Best Books for Young Readers

The Horn Book - Calling Caldecott: And we're off!

Huffington Post - 19 Children's Books To Read In Honor Of Hispanic Heritage Month

The Horn Book - Calling Caldecott: Alma and How She Got Her Name

A Cup of Jo - 12 Beautiful Children's Books

Parents Magazine - 20 Best Books for Latino Kids

Mr. Schu Reads - Sharp-Schu 2019 Mock Caldecott List

New York Public Library - 2018 Best Books for Kids

Chicago Public Library - Best Books 2018

Evanston Public Library - 101 Great Books for Kids 2018

School Library Journal - Best Books 2018

Kirby Larson - Friend Friday Juana Martinez-Neal

The News & Observer - The best children's books of 2018 reflect today's society, and our changing times

Mr. Brian's Picture Book Picks - My favorite 30 picture books of 2018

A Mighty Girl - 50 Empowering Books Starring Latina Mighty Girls

Fierce Mitú - Latinx Books For People You May Have Forgotten to Buy Gifts For

Latinidad - Best Books of the Year

New York Times - Moms Start Companies to Fill Demand for Spanish Books

Bookstagram Choice Awards - Winner: Best Own Voice Picture Book 2018

Fuse 8 - 31 Days, 31 Lists: 2018 Bilingual Books for Kids

Bookriot - 52 Awesome Children's Books of 2018

The Inquirer - Holiday gift ideas for kids from the Free Library

NEPR - Multicultural Kids' Books That Teach Life Lessons, Prompt Creativity

100 Scope Notes - Top 20 Books of 2018

A Mighty Girl - 2018 Best Books of the Year

Fatherly - The Best Children's Books of 2018

Booklist - Booklist Editors' Choice: Books for Youth, 2018

Indiana Library Federation - 2019 Read Alouds Too-Good-To Miss Ageless

Huffington Post - The Best Children's Books Of 2018, According To Librarians

Nerdy Book Club - The 2018 Nerdies: Fiction Picture Books Announced by John Schu

Book Scrolling - The Best Children's Books of 2018 (A Year-End List Aggregation)

Fuse 8 - 31 Days, 31 Lists: 2018 Picture Books

Denver Public Library - Best & Brightest Picture Books of 2018

The Cybils Awards - 2018 Fiction Picture Book Finalist

Arizona Daily Star - Southwest Books of the Year: Ring in 2019 with some regional reads

Wisconsin Public Radio - Children's Book Recommendations For WPR's The Morning Show

Bank Street College of Education - The Best Children's Picture Books of the Year in Spanish 2019

The Children's Book Review - The Best Picture Books of 2018

National Education Association - 2018 Read Across America

ILA Children's Literature & Reading
Special Interest Group​ - Notable Books for a Global Society 2019

Texas Library Association - 2×2 Reading List 2019

ALSC - Notable Children's Books 2019

The Wall Street Journal - Children's Books: Handing Out the Hardware

Raising Arizona Kids - Scottsdale author and illustrator wins 2019 Caldecott Honor

The Ezra Jack Keats Foundation - 2019 EJK Award

The News Gazette - Alice B. McGinty | Two picture books deserving of accolades

WTNH - News 8 | Top children's books for promoting diversity

Children's Literature Assembly - 2019 Notable Children's Books in the Language Arts
Award Books

Story Monsters - April 2019 | Juana Martinez-Neal and How She Got Her Caldecott

We Are Kidlit Collective - 2019 Summer Reading List

ABC10 - 10 Books to Read for April 2019

Bank Street College of Education - Best Children's Books of the Year 2019

The Children's Book Council - From the Sketchbook, Children's Book Week Edition: Juana Martinez-Neal

Book Riot - The Kids are All Right

Anti Defamation League - Educator Discussion Guide
Guide created by Anti Defamation League. Direct download from ADL's site

Anti Defamation League - Parent/Family Discussion Guide
Guide created by Anti Defamation League. Direct download from ADL's site

School Library Journal - The Stories That Shape Us
Teaching Ideas for Alma and How She Got Her Name. Direct link to SLJ's site

Reading is Fundamental Literacy Central - Support Materials for Alma and How She Got Her Name
Support Materials for Alma and How She Got Her Name. Direct link to RIF's site

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What's in a name? For one little girl, her very long name tells a vibrant story of where she came from - and who she may one day be. In her author-illustrator debut, Juana Martinez-Neal opens a treasure box of discovery for children who may be curious about their own name or origin story.

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Martinez-Neal brings her gentle story to life through beautiful graphite and colored pencil artwork, set against cream-colored backgrounds. Soft blue and red details pop against the charcoal scenes, which perfectly reflect the snapshots of Alma's family. While Alma feels enriched by learning her family's history, she is also empowered by the knowledge that she will give her name, Alma, its own story.
-Booklist (starred review)

Martinez-Neal's first outing as author is a winner-her velvety and largely monochromatic pencil drawings, punctuated with cherry red, teem with emotional intimacy. It's an origin story that envelops readers like a hug.
-Publishers Weekly (starred review)

The softly colored images and curvilinear shapes that embrace the figures evoke a sense of warmth and affection. At the story's end, the only tale readers have not heard is Alma's. "You will make your own story," states her father. A beautifully illustrated, tender story to be shared with all children, sure to evoke conversations about their names.
-School Library Journal (starred review)

Mostly monochromatic against a cream background, the illustrations-print transfers with graphite and colored pencils-are delightful, capturing the distinctive essences of Alma's many namesakes...A celebration of identity, family and belonging.
-Kirkus Reviews

Throughout, grayscale print transfer illustrations have a soft visual texture, and subtle colored-pencil highlights in pinks and blues enliven each spread. The pictures end up stealing the show in their depiction of the sweet closeness between Alma and her father. They also convey a subtle, supernatural connection between Alma and her ancestors, whose images in the family photos make eye contact with her outside of her father's awareness.
-The Horn Book

As artist, her mostly black-and-white graphite and colored pencil drawings with splashes of red (suggesting now) and blue (capturing then) provide an additional, enhancing narrative: the family's Peruvian roots, Alma's avian and floral interests, her bilingual drawings, her historically inspired style sense, even a peek at Esperanza's worldly treasures...Names are so much more than a collection of letters and sounds, Martinez-Neal reminds. The book's final words, "What story would you like to tell?" become an invitation for readers to share and claim each of their own, distinctive stories, histories and identities.
-Shelf Awareness for Readers

Every piece of Alma's name, she discovers, comes to her from someone in her family, and, as she and her father talk, Alma feels a new sense of connection...Touching on cultural themes central to the recent Pixar movie "Coco," this is a tender outing for children ages 4-8.
-The Wall Street Journal

A great book for introducing family history and the importance of our place within it.
-Story Monsters Ink

Caldecott Honor Book HONOR 2019

Ezra Jack Keats New Writer/Illustrator Award HONOR 2019

Publishers Weekly Best Children's Book of the Year AWARD 2018

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Alma and How She Got Her Name by Juana Martinez-Neal: 9780763693558 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

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A 2019 Caldecott Honor Book What's in a name? For one little girl, her very long name tells the vibrant story of where she came from - and who she may one day be. If you ask her, Alma Sofia...

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Millions of students and educators across the country have returned to the classroom with high hopes of success, growth, and excitement. To support them, we chose All Are Welcome- a picture book by Alexandra Penfold and Suzanne Kaufman - as the focus of our back to school campaign to help the First Book Community of educators create a welcoming environment to help kids feel comfortable upon their return to school.

From arts and craft projects that inspire students to own their uniqueness to conversations of diversity and inclusion, several educators have used All Are Welcome tocreate opportunities for students to celebrate inclusivity within their community.

Arts and Crafts Inspiration

"As a kindergarten teacher at a school with a very diverse population, it is important for me to ensure our students and their families feel welcome and that their different cultures are honored. One way we do that is by ensuring that the children authentically see themselves in our classroom," said Carolyn Matson, a Kindergarten teacher in Ottowa, Ontario.

Matson used All Are Welcome as a springboard to help students identify variations in skin color by creating a multicultural poster filled with paint swatches of the skin tones of each student in the classroom.

"By looking carefully at our skin color, we could see both dramatic and nuanced differences," said Matson. "Asking the children to look closely allowed them to slow down and really observe... and often we would see the children go up and look carefully with a friend, comparing and contrasting and naming the colors. An added bonus for sure!"

Pictures from Suzanne Kaufman

Some educators have taken arts and craft elements from the book and applied them to their own schools, like creating yarn hearts on school fences, which expresses messages of love and acceptance to the outside community.

Many educators have have used All Are Welcome as a vehicle to start a discussion.

Facilitating a Conversation

"Usually, my sincere questions are met with the mumbled version of 'I don't know,' or silence. Not today. So many of the kids were open to weigh in on the causes," said Ro Menendez, First Book community member and school librarian at a Title 1 school in Texas.

Such dialogue encourages students to resolve the everyday challenges that once slowed their educational progress and urge them to apply these concepts in their own community to spread the idea that "All Are Welcome" everywhere. Students now better connect with their peers in spite of their many distinctions, uplift them in the classroom and community to help them feel acknowledged, heard, and understood, and realize that their differences are what truly brings them together.
How have you used All are Welcome in your classroom? Tag us on Twitter with the hashtag #WelcomeAllKids with a description of your activity!

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How Educators Use "All Are Welcome" in the Classroom

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Millions of students and educators across the country have returned to the classroom with high hopes of success, growth, and excitement. To support them, we chose All Are Welcome - a picture book by Alexandra Penfold and Suzanne Kaufman - as the focus of our back to school campaign to help the First Book Community of educators create a welcoming environment to help kids feel comfortable upon their return to school.

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We are ushering in a new school year with a new theme, an invitation to our library to read, grow, explore, and create. I want students to feel welcome in our library. I want them to know that this is their space and that this is a safe place. I did the following activity with grades 2-5 (1st graders are new to our building so I did an adapted version of this for them).

We began by brainstorming what "welcome" is:

Next, we read the book All Are Welcome written by Alexandra Penfold and illustrated by Suzanne Kaufman.

Students then went on a mission in the library to take a picture of an item or a procedure and decide how that item or procedure welcomes (or doesn't welcome) students and teachers. Students eagerly took off to take photos (and of course a few selfies were thrown in there).

Students then returned to the rug to share the items they located. First, they shared their findings in a small group before I asked the entire class for some volunteers to share with the whole class.

My takeaways

When I planned this activity I created a handout with step-by-step directions. I used this with one class and then ditched it. While I intended this to help direct students, I felt they were bogged down in the writing. They only had to answer 1 question on the back, but I think the amount of text intimidated them. Very few groups completed the task. I simplified. Ultimately, I told them they needed to find something (thing or procedure) and take a picture of it. When they got to the rug they would decide how it did or didn't welcome people into our library. Much easier. This gave us more time for discussion. I was hoping student responses would get into procedures - I suggested this to grades 4 and 5, but this may have been too abstract.

*I didn't have any students address how the library was NOT making them feel welcome during the discussion. (Odd, I expected at least a few), so I asked them to please consider this as the year progresses. I asked them to come to me when they were not feeling welcome. Immediately following our discussion in a 5th-grade class I had a partner team approach me. They "were not feeling welcome when I did not call on them right away when they had their hands raised." I gently reminded them that they DID get to share with the class, but I was moving around the room so all voices could be heard. They agreed and departed. I am hoping this will open lines of communication and keep us talking all year. Time will tell.

This idea morphed. I originally intended to try a Goosechase with my students. This does not meet the required student privacy guidelines for my district so I went to plan B. Plan B was a google form submission of their photo so I could collect all of the images in one place. However, a google form needs a unique sign in for digital uploads. I wanted to use iPads for a quick point and click activity. Logging in to student accounts was going to slow us down significantly (I barely squeezed this all in during our time). Ultimately, I ditched all of my lovely, creative ideas and went simple.

Take a picture.

Defend your choice.

Share.

I got students talking, sharing, and noticing new (and old) things around our library. All were feeling welcome. Mission accomplished.

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All Are Welcome: Welcoming in a New School Year

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We are ushering in a new school year with a new theme, an invitation to our library to read, grow, explore, and create. I want students to feel welcome in our library. I want them to know that this is their space and that this is a safe place.

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Whether you've lived in the same community your entire life or it's brand new for you, today is a different day. Today is the start of something filled with potential and unexpected twists and turns. Today is about being your best self and helping others to be the same.

As individuals open the doors of their school and walk down the hallways, they need to know everyone is accepted and appreciated regardless of physical characteristics, ethnicity, or religion. All Are Welcome ( Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children's Books, July 10, 2018) written by Alexandra Penfold with illustrations by Suzanne Kaufman is like walking into a party where everyone got an invitation. All feel the jubilation of being honored equally.

Pencils sharpened in their case.
Bells are ringing, let's make haste.
School's beginning, dreams to chase.
All are welcome here.
Children chatter around the room as parents deliver them into their teacher's care. The gals and guys come from countries around the world, dressing differently, practicing religions differently and living in families with different dynamics. They embrace these differences. They are children.

Spending time with musical instruments and placing colorful paints on paper with brushes is done with merry intention. There are universal truths found in the telling of certain tales. Connections are made through these stories. They are children.

Midway through the day, the cafeteria is an array of cuisine from various continents. Food is shared and tasted. The playground is a happy haven of games galore. All join together for fun. They are children.

In this neighborhood diversity is uplifted. The knowledge and gifts of one child are freely given to another. Cultural traditions are enjoyed by all. When the school day comes to a close, everyone leaves hardly able to wait for the next day. They embrace these differences. They are children. They are hope. Sweet dreams you beautiful little people.

As you read these words written byAlexandra Penfold you find yourself gently swaying or maybe softly tapping your foot. Whether you are reading them silently or aloud, a melody comes unbidden into the stream of the story. The repeat of the phrase All are welcome here invites participation. There is never a question of whether a child or their family is acknowledged or respected. It's simply who the people in this school are. By the time you get to the end, you find yourself wrapped in harmony and happiness. It's the best kind of feeling. Here is another passage.

Open doors, rush outside.
We will swing we will slide.
We'll have fun side by side.
All are welcome here.
Animated and vibrant the image spread across the opened dust jacket celebrates all children and their families. They are eager to enter their school building. They are smiling and greeting each other. The yellow and white striped walkway and the bold and bright colors on their clothing placed on a white varnished background shouts out a big "Hello world! Here we come!" (There is a treat on the inside of the dust jacket.) On the book case thirty different children in three rows of ten (separated by the spine) are spread across the front and back. They are clasping hands and looking right at the readers. It's as if they are saying we are in this together. Won't you join us?

On the opening and closing endpapers a cityscape including the school is presented. On the first parents are walking through the neighborhood with their children at the start of the day. (In this picture and all the images there is a prevalent use of primary colors.) On the final endpapers the school day is over and it's near sunset. Families are gathering again and carrying food for a special festival. The school building is on the left side. As our eyes move to the right we see the playground. Behind this are apartment buildings. Beneath the title text a taxi is en route. A father is driving his little girl to school.

All of the illustrations created using acrylic paint, ink, crayon, and collage with Adobe Photoshop by Suzanne Kaufman span either two pages, a single page, or several visuals are grouped on one or two pages. These shifts in size contribute to enhancing the text and accentuating the pacing. Some of the smaller pictures are loosely framed in soft shapes. A dramatic four-page gatefold will send your spirits soaring.

It's important to notice all the details Suzanne Kaufman uses in completing her images. The color and type of clothing, the body positions and facial expressions on all the people, adults and children, and what is emphasized in the classroom settings contribute to the overall sense of the book. She uses white space as a valuable element throughout the story.

One of my many favorite illustrations is when the children are on the playground after lunch. It spans two pages. (Even after looking at it multiple times, I expect to hear the shouts and laughter of the children at any moment.) Across three quarters of the picture is the surface of the playground. Above that is a layer of grass and then blue sky, trees bearing fall foliage and a full sun. Several children are reading under one of the trees. On the left all four swings are being used. Children are bouncing a ball for four square. Teether balls are looping around poles on the right. Two children are playing near the red slide. A group gathers around the map of the world painted on the surface of the playground. This is a wonderful sight!

Have you ever looked at something so full of pure contentment you wanted to laugh out loud? This book, All Are Welcome written by Alexandra Penfold with illustrations by Suzanne Kaufman, is one of those things. The blend of words and illustrations leaves readers with a form of bliss so complete, there will be many requests to have it read again. I highly recommend this title for your professional and personal collections.

To learn more about Alexandra Penfold and Suzanne Kaufman and their other work, please visit their websites by following the links attached to their names. Both and maintain blogs. Alexandra is on and . Suzanne is also on . You can view interior pages at the publisher's website. This book and Suzanne are showcased at Pragmatic Mom: Education Matters.

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Whether you've lived in the same community your entire life or it's brand new for you, today is a different day. Today is the start of something filled with potential and unexpected twists and turns. Today is about being your best self and helping others to be the same.

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children's books, illustration, animation, art

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A graduate of New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study, Alexandra Penfold began her career in publishing as a children's book publicist at Simon & Schuster where she worked on media campaigns that appeared in USA Today, Newsweek, US News and World Report, and NPR's All Things Considered. For eight years she served as an editor at Paula Wiseman Books/Simon & Schuster working on award-winning books for young readers of all ages. She is currently a literary agent with Upstart Crow Literary representing children book authors and illustrators as well as select adult projects.

Alex has been a food obsessive from her earliest days. She's the co-author of New York a la Cart: Recipes and Stories from the Big Apple's Best Food Trucks. Her writing has appeared on SeriousEats.com, Real Cheap Eats, InStyle Magazine and in Time Out New York. There are few things she loves as much as playing with food. She has developed recipes for companies and brands including Wal-Mart, Pillsbury, Nestle, Nabisco, and General Mills among others.

She is the author of several books for children: Eat, Sleep, Poop illustrated by Jane Massey, We Are Brothers, We Are Friends, illustrated by Eda Kaban, and the forthcoming titles: Food Truck Fest, illustrated by Mike Dutton and The Littlest Viking, illustrated by Isabel Roxas.

Alexis popular speaker on all aspects of writing for children from drafting to pacing to revision. Her talks at writing conferences and retreats have given her the opportunity to criss-cross the country speaking to writers and illustrators in 23 states (and counting!) and she enjoys speaking to crowds of all sizes and all ages. If you're interested in adding Alex to your upcoming conference or retreat, please contact her here.

When she isn't writing and drinking strong iced coffee, she can be found perfecting her lattice crust. Follow her on Twitter @AgentPenfold and Instagram @bklynbrownie.

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Alexandra Penfold - Children's Book Author

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A graduate of New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study, Alexandra Penfold began her career in publishing as a children's book publicist at Simon & Schuster where she worked on media campaigns that appeared in USA Today, Newsweek, US News and World Report, and NPR's All Things Considered.

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Please welcome my guest author today, illustrator Suzanne Kaufman, who talks about her inspiration for All Are Welcome in response to President Trump's travel ban. She wanted to do something positive, so she offered her skills as an illustrator to create a poster and the book was born of this effort.

All Are Welcome by Alexandra Penfold, illustrated by Suzanne Kaufman

This rhyming picture book gives children assurance that everyone is welcomed with open arms. This is a school where kids with patkas, hijabs, yarmulkes, and baseball caps play side by side. From eating food from around the world to celebrating Lunar New Year, this gentle picture book celebrates diversity in all the wonderful ways it is expressed. What is especially nice is that the poster that inspired this book is on the back of the book jacket! [picture book, ages 2 and up]

We are giving away a copy of All Are Welcome. Please fill out the Rafflecopter at the bottom to enter.

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The Story Behind ALL ARE WELCOME !

A year ago, in December after the announcement of soon-to-be President Trump's planned travel ban, I felt deep sadness and completely helpless. My daughters' school Kimball Elementary is comprised predominately of immigrant families from all over the world, from many different religious backgrounds. I wanted the kids in my community and all children to know they were safe and welcome at their school the next morning. Then I remembered a quote by Nina Simone.

You can't help it. An artist's duty, as far as I'm concerned, is to reflect the times.

I felt instantly compelled to do something, with the one thing I could freely give, my art. So, I stayed up all night and made a poster to welcome all the kids to the school the next morning.

This still did not feel enough, so I posted it on social media to print for classrooms. I hoped it could help other teachers and schools support their students. Since posting, it has been printed by educators nationwide to let their families know they are safe and welcome in their schools.

My husband and I are fortunate to be raising our daughters in Beacon Hill, a multicultural neighborhood, nestled above downtown Seattle. It is among one of the most diverse zip codes in the U.S. Almost half of the residents are foreign-born and roughly 60 percent speak a language other than English at home. It's not uncommon to see girls in our school wearing hijabs. It's also not uncommon for the whole school to gather to learn a Vietnamese dance or celebrate the start of the Lunar New Year with a Lion Dance blessing. Our school's PTA meetings have the feel of a mini-United Nations and diversity and community are not just protected, but celebrated.

Around the same time, I published my art, the author, Alexandra Penfold received a letter (as did all the other NYC school parents) about how the schools would protect students right to receive an education and not turn over any immigration information. There are 25 different languages and dialects spoken in her son's school and 80% of children speak a language other than English at home. It was a shot to the heart for her to say the least.

That night before she went to sleep she saw someone had shared my poster on social media. It was one of the last things she peeked at before going to bed. She also felt the strong urge to put something out there that's reassuring to these same kids and woke up in the middle of the night with an idea for a story to go with the poster.

ALL ARE WELCOME Picture Book Giveaway!

We are giving away a copy of All Are Welcome. Please fill out the Rafflecopter below to enter. We can only mail to U.S. addresses.
a Rafflecopter giveaway Suzanne Kaufman lives in Seattle with her husband Jonathan and two monkeys, Eleanor and Katie, who sometimes pretend to be girls. Born in the Midwest, Suzanne grew up on healthy doses of Saturday morning cartoons and macaroni and cheese.
To examine any book more closely at IndieBound, please click on image of book. As an IndieBound Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.
She has been monkeying around with children's books, animation and cartoons since she was little (that's her in the picture back in the 1970s!). Her style is inspired by midcentury design and 1950s-era cartoons. Over the years, she's done everything from animating special effects for Universal and Discovery, to animating award-winning video games. One of those games-Sly Cooper-won the Children's Title of the Year award. She currently a senior lecturer for film and video game animation.

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The Story Behind ALL ARE WELCOME and a GIVEAWAY!

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Please welcome my guest author today, illustrator Suzanne Kaufman, who talks about her inspiration for All Are Welcome in response to President Trump's travel ban. She wanted to do something positive, so she offered her skills as an illustrator to create a poster and the book was born of this effort.

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All Are Welcome - Read Aloud Picture Book | Brightly Storytime

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"Penfold and Kaufman have outdone themselves in delivering a vital message in today's political climate." - Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"Celebrate a school community as a great common ground where families of all kinds connect and share in their children's educational journey.... the book's refrain of "All are welcome here" feels both deeply reassuring and almost radical in our polarized time." - Publishers Weekly

"This is a must-read for pre-school and elementary classrooms everywhere." - Trudy Ludwig, author of The Invisible Boy

California Young Reader Master List NOMINEE 2021

Kansas State Reading Circle Award SELECTION 2019

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All Are Welcome by Alexandra Penfold: 9780525579649 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

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Join the call for a better world with this New York Times bestselling picture book about a school where diversity and inclusion are celebrated. The perfect back-to-school read for every kid, family and...

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When Bao Phi's family fled Vietnam in 1975 and settled in Minneapolis with other refugees, he was just a few months old. He was too young to understand the scene at the airport that day: Communist soldiers were firing rockets at planes filled with people trying to escape, incinerating them in the sky. Phi's parent's told him about their family history bit by bit, and he began to form a stronger sense of his own identity.

"You know, just as a man of color, as an Asian-American, like anything could happen to me. I could get hit by a car. I could get hit by lightning," he says. "You know, some racist cop could kill me, or some racist on the street could just decide he doesn't like the way I look and if that happens, what is my daughter going to have to know where I come from and where half of her comes from?"

His new book, Thousand Star Hotel, is a cutting collection of poems about growing up a refugee, becoming a father, feeling surrounded by police brutality and the invisibility of poor Asian-Americans. Phi says that when he was young, he never saw experiences like his taught in schools or talked about. He hopes that his new work might serve as a "guidebook" for his 7-year-old daughter Song and other Asian-Americans looking to see their own experiences reflected.

In his poem "Lead," Phi recounts a time when he was helping his father patch up vandalized property. His father insists he feels the flick of BB gun pellets - that someone is shooting at him. But Phi thinks they're mosquitoes, and that his dad might just be reliving a remnant of war:

"I am sure they are just mosquitoes
even when I see dull lead fragments sticking
into his brown skin.
I didn't want to believe him,
even as I helped him wash his wounds.

You need someone to care for your life,
or at least your dignity.
My dad had a son who believed in invisible mosquitoes
more than the evil of men."

Phi's first children's book, A Different Pond, comes out in August. He noticed, as he was looking for books for his daughter, that there was a dearth of children's literature about Asian-Americans. The books marketed as "Asian" in kid's literature tended to center on East Asia, he said. That left a big hole. And so he took it upon himself to write a book based on his own childhood, drawn from early-morning memories spent fishing with his father.
What's the meaning of the title Thousand Star Hotel?
"Thousand star hotel" is actually a saying by Vietnamese folks. It's kind of a play on the idea of a four star hotel, and Vietnamese folks say that you don't need to have a four star hotel - you have a thousand star hotel every night. Everyone has the right to a thousand star hotel, just by looking at the sky. That's a saying I've heard throughout my adult life - I've heard it from cyclo drivers when I went back to Vietnam. ...
How do you describe what it's about?

I think that different races struggle against different types of racism. I think that, Asian-Americans, it's 'We're never from here,' and so our history is largely seen as irrelevant if it gets acknowledged at all.

But the reason that I named the book that, was that I was reminded of that phrase reading Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer where he brought that up. And when I was reading his book I thought, "That's it. That's the title of my book." And the reason is, I just think it's hella Vietnamese. ... It's sly, it's kind of smart-assed, but it's also about survival and making the best of it.
Can you talk a little bit more about that - "the erasure of Asian-Americans"?
The book has a lot of poems ranging in subject from police brutality to the invisibility of urban poor Asian-Americans to fatherhood and what it's like to raise a child as a refugee from war. [It's about] whether or not I pass on the trauma of war down to my daughter, the lack of Asian-American history in American public schools, and you know, love and relationships.

And basically in a way, I feel like the book is one, me writing in resistance against the erasure of Asian-Americans - Vietnamese-Americans in particular - but also as, I guess, a marker of the life of my parents, my family, people like me that often don't reach any type of visibility in this country.

As a father, my child is not in all-white environments here in Minnesota. The majority of her peers are brown and black. At the same time, there is just no awareness of Asian-American history in her school at all.

She's learning about a lot of different people, a lot of different races, a lot of different genders all across the spectrum. But conspicuously, Asian-Americans are left out. And that's not a dig on her teachers. Teachers are hard-working people who get no pay and no recognition. It's more about curriculum, and I think, the larger issue of Asian-American history just being invisible in America.
You've mentioned before that this work is, in a way, for your daughter.

There was no guidebook for a Southeast Asian from war growing up in the hood in America two blocks from the Native American housing projects.

You know, I think that different races struggle against different types of racism. I think that, Asian-Americans, it's "We're never from here," and so our history is largely seen as irrelevant if it gets acknowledged at all.
How'd you learn about your own family's story?
Hopefully when she gets older she won't find my poetry so boring. [Laughs] You know, just as a man of color, as an Asian-American, like anything could happen to me. I could get hit by a car. I could get hit by lightning. You know, some racist cop could kill me, or some racist on the street could just decide he doesn't like the way I look and if that happens, what is my daughter going to have to know where I come from and where half of her comes from? . ...

I think that the idea of Asian and Asian-Americans is that we're all like valedictorians who get into Harvard and become engineers or dot com - and that's fine, that's part of who we are. But I think for the vast majority of us that's actually not our story. For the vast majority of us, the stories are not about success. ... And I gotta believe that there are people out there who both need to see that and maybe learn from it.

So I'm the youngest child. I was born in Vietnam in February [of 1975] and the tanks rolled into Saigon of April of that same year. So I was about three months old when we were forced to flee. ... My father was in the Southern Vietnamese military, which meant we were on the side of the United States. My mother worked in a gift shop in the university in Saigon. ... My dad planned to get an education, war broke out so he and his brother and many other Vietnamese enlisted in the military. We fled that April. ...

So I'm in this strange position where I was present for that but I have no memory of it. Fortunately, my family filled me in on the details as I was older. ... Basically we went from that to refugee camps to being raised in the Phillips neighborhood of South Minneapolis, which at the time was Minneapolis' largest, poorest and most racially diverse neighborhood. My parents still live there, I live nearby in the Powderhorn neighborhood now raising my daughter. ...

Obviously my family was traumatized by war, that was very apparent. ... I remember hearing these stories when I was pretty young. And so, I think to my parents' credit. I think they tried to tell me as much as they could, you know, not to fill me with fear but to let me know that I come from something, you know what I mean? That we come from struggle, and that we come from survival.

They told me bits and pieces throughout, but I still learned. For instance, just two years ago, it wasn't until a friend of mine who's a Vietnamese-American documentary filmmaker from the Bay came to visit us, and talked to my father that my father told me the part about how when we were trying to flee, he ... routinely saw plane loads of Vietnamese people getting killed when rockets would hit, you know, a plane that was trying to lift off, take off, and just incinerating every Vietnamese person on that plane.
How'd you learn about your identity?
He saw that again and again on the night that we were trying to escape. And he was sure that the same was going to happen to our family - he was just sure that we all would get killed. And somehow, when that plane lifted up and a rocket didn't hit us and we managed to escape, he felt like all the luck in his life had just been used up in that moment. And that was why he felt like he put up with all the struggle, the prejudice, the pain that he faced in the United States. Because from his perspective, we were just lucky to be alive. ...

I've been told those, many different stories, of those days throughout my life - beginning from when I was very young.

Growing up where I did, I had the fortune of getting involved in social justice movements early. I mean, I was an idiot, but I was involved - I was soaking up as much information as I could. You know, the American Indian Movement started in my neighborhood. ...

I had the fortune of having a African-American teacher in high school teach African-American studies ... he also happened to be the gym teacher. ... But I wasn't learning about Asian and Asian-American people. ... I was learning about these different movements, but I was like, so what does that make me? . ...
Talk to me about your new kid's book, A Different Pond This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. .
I think especially for Vietnamese people, we're talking about a time when the idea of the war was really raw. And I had learned after I had graduated that many teachers in our system, in our school system, didn't teach about the Vietnam War because it was too painful for them. So I was getting no education about me and my people, aside from things that I would learn from my parents from some community stuff. ... It's especially challenging for Vietnamese-Americans who have lefty politics, you know, a lot of us who are here in America are here because of fear of persecution from the Communist party, and a lot of Asian-American movements, as Viet Thanh Nguyen acknowledged, a lot of them come from a Marxist, third world organizing, socialist kind of brew, right? Of student organizing in the '60s, which is perfectly fine but then that can butt up directly against Vietnamese and Vietnamese-American experience, where we're fleeing from a lot of that ideology, you know what I mean? It was an added layer of complication for me.

I got a full scholarship to Macalester College. I was the first in my family to get a full ride to a private college. I didn't know what that meant when I was young, I was like, "Cool, free school." And there I happened to meet a chemistry teacher, Japanese-American chemistry teacher by the name of Janet Carlson who, [in] my sophomore year, started to teach an Asian-American studies class. ... It's funny, I learned African-American studies from a gym teacher and Asian-American studies from a chemistry teacher. That's basically my life, right?

A Different Pond is my first children's book. It's gonna be published by Capstone, it comes out in August, and it's really a very simple story based on - it's loosely based on fishing trips my father would take me on when I was very young. We would fish for food, we wouldn't usually fish for fun. In fact, I'm pretty sure - I can talk about this now, I hope - a lot of the fishing we did was probably illegal. We didn't have licenses, I'm pretty sure we were fishing in some places we weren't supposed to be at - but we were fishing for food to help put food on the table. Both my parents worked two jobs a piece for as long as I can remember and fishing was another way to cut costs a little bit, you know?

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The Poet Bao Phi, On Creating A 'Guidebook' For Young Asian-Americans

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subscribe to Code Switch podcast subscribe to Code Switch podcast When Bao Phi's family fled Vietnam in 1975 and settled in Minneapolis with other refugees, he was just a few months old. He was too young to understand the scene at the airport that day: Communist soldiers were firing rockets at planes filled with people trying to escape, incinerating them in the sky.

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Bao Phi, author of A Different Pond, stops by the podcast to talk about expressing gratitude, a generation working hard invisibly, and being thankful for having distance from childhood attitudes.

About the Author

Matthew Winner

Matthew Winner is an elementary library media specialist in Elkridge, Maryland. He is is the co-founder and content director of All The Wonders, a children's literature website and more, and host of the Let's Get Busy podcast, a weekly podcast where Matthew talks to authors, illustrators, award winners, up-and-comers, and everyone in between. In 2013 Matthew was named a Library Journal Mover & Shaker and was invited to the White House as part of the Champions of Change program. For more information, connect with Matthew on Twitter at @MatthewWinner .

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Bao Phi, author of A Different Pond , stops by the podcast to talk about expressing gratitude, a generation working hard invisibly, and being thankful for having distance from childhood attitudes. About the Author Matthew Winner Matthew Winner is an elementary library media specialist in Elkridge, Maryland.

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A Different Pond, written by acclaimed poet Bao Phi and illustrated by graphic novelist Thi Bui, is a lyrical, touching story about a father-son fishing trip in the wee hours of the morning. Bao based the story on his own experiences of getting up early to go fishing with his father and the thoughts he had on the future his parents were building for him and his siblings.

Thi Bui was truly the perfect illustrator for this picture book. Her illustrations are ethereal, capturing that bleary-eyed feeling of waking up before the sun rises, but also incorporating rich oranges and blues (which are complementary colors) that allow Thi to highlight specific bits of each illustration. The illustrations themselves are inked, with what looks like gouache coloring, so they hearken back to traditional Vietnamese artwork while still maintaining a vibrant, modern look. The technique is a beautiful visual marriage between living in a new world and maintaining tradition, the very two concepts the text explores.

What makes this book so unique is the blend between traditional picture book illustration and Thi's subtle use of graphic novel elements. Readers see various panels on any given spread, so the book becomes a beautifully-designed lesson in visual narrative literacy. How do the panels connect with each other? Which do you "read" first? If we see six images of the same boy in one spread, does that mean there are six different characters? Readers learn that all of these images are connected, and the images of the six boys in different positions across the spread actually indicate the movement of one boy (Bao) across the page: first he collects sticks, then builds his fire, and then he finally starts it. The visual cues - all six boys are wearing the same clothes, for instance - open up tons of room for discussion of what Bao is doing in this scene and allow young readers to practice their visual narrative literacy by picking up on these contextual clues.

And, of course, the panels allow for readers to find their own rhythm. Each panel is cordoned off from the others, filled with its own story and emotions. Each panel essentially becomes a smaller story within the larger story, allowing readers to reflect on the actions that occur within each. For instance, we see a spread of Bao's street with a solo panel of him in the bottom left-hand corner. In that moment - the moment of driving to the pond - we get a closer glimpse of Bao's emotions. So while the text distances itself, remaining mostly factual, we as readers get a brief moment of connection with Bao with this close-up of his face.

One of the best books for discussing visual narratives that I've experienced in a long time!

Available Now

Purchase A Different Pond by Bao Phi and Thi Bui for your reader or readers.

About the Author

Mel Schuit

Mel is a picture book author, illustrator, and enthusiast with an MA in Children's Literature, an MFA in Writing for Children, and a BA in Studio Art. She is currently querying her first picture book about Penelope, a pineapple who is trying to find a creative solution to a very spiky problem. Visit her at LetsTalkPictureBooks.com and follow her on twitter and Instagram @spiky_Penelope

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A Different Pond: Layers of Visual Narrative

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A Different Pond , written by acclaimed poet Bao Phi and illustrated by graphic novelist Thi Bui, is a lyrical, touching story about a father-son fishing trip in the wee hours of the morning.

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A boy and his dad go fishing early one morning, but this trip isn't just about father-son bonding time:

" '[W]hy do we still have to fish for food?' I ask.

'Everything in America costs a lot of money,' [Dad] explains."

This particular morning they fish in relative quiet; the boy and his father don't see the Hmong man "who speaks English like my dad and likes to tell funny jokes," or the African American man with his colorful collections of fishing lures. Dad tells the boy, "I used to fish by a pond like this one when I was a boy in Vietnam." It's not something Dad talks about often, his time in Vietnam, and we soon find out why: "He and his brother fought side by side [in the Vietnam War]. One day, his brother didn't come home."

We also see how much the boy idolizes his father through the interplay between Phi's text and Bui's art. When he starts the fire going "with just one match," the boy earns a nod of approval from Dad - a close-up (in its own panel) shows the boy's proud smile. And when Dad relays this story of triumph to Mom, the boy stands in profile, smiling warmly in the foreground while helping in the kitchen.

I get the same feeling from Bao Phi's writing in A Different Pond that I do when I read Matt de la Peña's Newbery Medal-winning text for Last Stop on Market Street. I don't make this comparison lightly. There are many distinguished picture book texts published each year, but this one is special in the way it conveys so much emotional depth with such understated grace.

"A kid at my school said my dad's English sounds like a thick, dirty river. But to me his English sounds like gentle rain."

"I rub my hands together, yawn, and look up to see faint stars like freckles."

Phi's attention to detail establishes a real sense of place within the text while presenting an authentically loving father-son relationship.

"Dad hands me a sandwich... 'Careful of the spicy stuff,' he says.

There's half a peppercorn, like a moon split in two, studded into the meat."

And then there's Thi Bui's accompanying artwork. (Before we get to that, let me just put in a plug for Bui's graphic memoir, The Best We Could Do; it's probably my single favorite book of 2017. If you haven't seen it yet, find a copy post-haste and read it. You'll thank me later!) Bui's meticulous use of color and shadow establish the moody, EARLY morning setting. As the boy and his dad drive to the pond, blues and grays of the pre-dawn street contrast with the golden leaves of the trees. The spread showing their arrival at the pond shows the wild, scrubby slope down to the water in a surreal range of bluish-greens (it also shows clearly the "No Trespassing" sign along the fence). And on their way home, as the rising sun shines through the car windows in "just a faint tint, blue and gray instead of gold," Bui expertly uses those blues and grays (with a healthy dose of black shadow) to create a moody light quality that feels just right for that moment of the day.

The best picture books have a feeling to them that can be hard to pinpoint; the word "lasting" comes to mind. For me, A Different Pond has a lasting quality to it that few other books have. Buy it, gift it, and read it to the children in your life.

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Spotlight on #OwnVoices: A Different Pond

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A boy and his dad go fishing early one morning, but this trip isn't just about father-son bonding time: " '[W]hy do we still have to fish for food?' I ask. 'Everything in America costs a lot of money,' [Dad] explains."

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Contributing writer Jade Hidle reflects on the role of reading in her own childhood, and speaks to Bao Phi and Thi Bui about their Caldecott Honor illustrated children's book, A Different Pond.
When I was a young reader, books served a specific function in the relationship between my single mother and me. They kept me occupied and quiet. My page-flipping offered her hours to work, cook, sleep, and do whatever else she needed to do without worrying about me out in the dangers of our neighborhood. Reading was not otherwise a part of our lives. My grandmother was only able to access a second-grade education, so literacy was not part of our matrilineal culture-storytelling, yes, but books, no.

During weekend or summer visits to my dad's house, one of our rituals was going to the bookstore where he would always indulge me with a picture book, then serialized chapter books such as Sweet Valley Twins or The Babysitter's Club -all equally addicting and completely unrelatable to me, the daughter of a poor recent immigrant from Viet Nam. (Looking back, I could be down with TBC's Claudia Kishi as a rare representation of an Asian American girl in young adult fiction, but I definitely did not share her experiences of being part of any club, or her sister's model minority-compliant astronomically high IQ, or living in a house or any other bougie stuff like that.)

Chapter books led to the literary gateway drugs of Stephen King and Dean Koontz, and that's when the function of reading shifted. My books filling the once-empty shelves of our apartment became a visual measuring stick of the words I knew but my mother did not. Once when I was in high school, she got so pissed at me when she realized I had stayed up all night reading (the least of my shenanigans at that age). Through her eyes, reading was now a leisurely way to waste time when I should have been cleaning the house or cooking or working hard on something, anything. It seemed that every time I opened a book was an affront to her lack of a childhood with books and that doing so was my buy-in to American culture and all the things that white people wrote around and against us. Reading cleaved the distance between my mother and I, between Viet Nam and America.

So much of parenting gets negotiated from generation to generation, especially with immigration and translations of culture, and I struggle in determining what to keep and revise from my upbringing as the first American-born child in my family. When I gave birth to my daughter last year, one change I vowed was to make reading a positive experience, a ritual that would bond us rather than divide us. Reading and her Vietnamese heritage would not be positioned at odds with one another.

Back when I was swollen with baby, I built her library, grateful for the increasing diversity in children's books, yet also feeling incomplete. I cleaned Amazon out of all the Vietnamese-English bilingual board books with their crude illustrations of white and black children performing the actions of narrative such as "I eat breakfast" (somehow all the kids in these books have a full-on trucker's feast of eggs, sausage, toast, and juice-a bounty I did not taste as a kid fed from food stamps and the Naval commissary). All of these books left me wanting a text that would offer my daughter a glimpse of the complex history and multifaceted culture from which she was born.

In the absence of books that bridged this gap, I was ineffably excited when I heard of the release of , a beautiful collaboration between poet Bao Phi and graphic memoirist Thi Bui, that has since been recognized as a A Different Pond Caldecott Honor Book for 2018. I'd been introduced to both writers through diaCRITICS. I'd borne witness to the power of Phi's spoken word poetry at USC and have since taught his work every semester, and reveled in the beauty of Bui's The Best We Could Do , which moved me to tears when I was pregnant. Excited about this creative partnership, I asked Bao and Thi what they wanted A Different Pond to contribute to children's literature.

Thi: "I wanted Vietnamese Americans to get to experience shared nostalgia, similar to what people felt for the Eighties watching the show Stranger Things , but with our specific ephemera, you know? Like the fish sauce in a mayonnaise jar, the hugging pillow, the hand-me-down clothes from the Seventies. People of color get erased from a lot of quintessential American stories, including the story of the working class. I wanted to reinsert them with a bit of the truth that I know."

Bao: "It was a very simple idea: I wanted my daughter to have a book that told a story from a working class, Vietnamese American refugee experience. It's not meant to be representational for all of us. Though many of her books are wonderful and we made an effort to get her books that are multicultural, multiracial, and multigendered, there seemed to be very little Asian American and Vietnamese American refugee books out there that also dealt with class. I'm hoping that there will be more and more stories to come."

My daughter was only two months old when I eagerly opened the copy of A Different Pond that arrived on our doorstep. Although she was just a glassy-eyed writhing sweet potato at the time, my baby was rapt with attention when I opened the book for her. Her mesmerism was no doubt indebted to Bui's beautiful artwork-hues of night and light that are rich yet subtle, faces warm through cold air, wide open yet intimately focused on this family. Her illustrations lend shape and color to a quiet moment that is full. My daughter and I were fully sucked in with how Bui's drawings couple with Phi's narrative that spotlights a child's treasured moments with his father. The plot is simple: a father wakes up his son in the early hours of the morning to go fishing at a local pond. Yet in between building fire and baiting lines, so much more happens in the seemingly "empty" or "silent" moments.

In the story, the father tells his son stories about his fishing pond in Viet Nam, alluding to the war and a lost brother. The boy's interest is piqued and he begins to see what is and is not there: "I look at the trees as we walk back to the car. I wonder what the trees look like at that other pond, in the country my dad comes from." The young boy sees so much of his father that others cannot, would not-his English is a "gentle rain" even though the kids at school make fun of his "thick, dirty river" of an accent. And they share an unspoken understanding, evident when the boy declines his father's request to bait a minnow and then assures himself, "He isn't upset with me." This is poignant for a children's book because I think we underestimate how much time, energy, and love that young people devote to trying to understand and care for their parents, especially for those of us whose parents carry from their homelands histories unspoken.

Viet Nam bubbles up in that pond, crossing time and space, as the boy comes of age in providing for the family by catching fish. You can feel the pride of the young boy participating in this early morning ritual, to contribute to his hard-working parents. Notably, toward the end of the book the verbs shift to future tense as the boy watches his parents leave for work: "I know that later on they will both come home." Here I related to the feeling of always waiting for my mother, of needing to reassure myself that her return was certain in a world where past and future felt very uncertain. In the book, the boy awaits his parents' return from a day of hard work so that they can share a meal of the fish they caught, and in this moment it crystallizes that, although this family of refugees does not have a lot materially, they have a lot-history, ritual, each other, and the indefatigable work of building a life in a new country.

This is what all the books, in both languages, on my newborn's bookshelf were lacking-that deep feeling of growing up working-class Vietnamese. Of course, this is not to say that we all grew up the same, but there is an ineffable understanding of seeing and being seen. When I asked Bao and Thi about what they hope diasporic Vietnamese families in particular take away from A Different Pond, they articulated that feeling:

Bao: "I hope they see an appreciation for the sacrifice and struggle that they went through and continue to go through. The Asian American experience in particular is one of erasure, one of dismissal, and I hope this book is a small step in intervening in that."

Thi: "Pride, hope, remembrance, some pleasure. And the ability to pass on some of our history in this country to their kids, and share it with other kids as well."

I was curious, then, about Bao and Thi's experiences of sharing the book with the children in their lives.

Bao: "When I first read it to my daughter, she seemed kinda "meh" about it. Which is fine. But a week later, out of the blue, she asked me to come to her school and read it to her and her classmates. The school she goes to is more than 80% people of color, but the curriculum of education in the US often ignores Asian American history, and there have been times when my young daughter has shown confusion and hurt about this invisibility. It was moving to me that my daughter wanted her fellow classmates to hear this story."

Thi: "I was visiting a friend who has three little boys, all Vietnamese American. Their dad pointed to the little boy in the book and asked them, 'Who's that?' And they saw themselves in him."

Indeed, that is the great power of A Different Pond -an offer of personal story to combat invisibility and assure young readers of their selfhood. I appreciated that Bao and Thi at the end of the book they shared brief biographical blurbs that go beyond the traditional children's book author/artist bio. As a young reader, I felt that children's books were divorced from the authors' real lives. I wondered if they had real lives. Did Dr. Seuss live in such a whimsical world? (When I later learned about his anti-Japanese political cartoons, I didn't read his rhymes the same way again.) And who the hell was this bearded giant grinning at me from the back cover of A Light in the Attic?

I asked Bao and Thi about the ways in which they drew upon their personal experiences as Vietnamese Americans in the story and artwork for A Different Pond.

Bao: "For many years I avoided writing much from my personal experience, but A Different Pond contains many elements of my actual experience. Many of the details of the fishing trip were informed by similar real life trips my father would take me on as a young boy, from the characters who sometimes came to the same pond, to the bait shop, to the stuff in the end papers that Thi beautifully illustrated."

Thi: "Some of the drawings are based on photos that Bao shared with me. Other details are lifted from my own memories of family life and America in the early Eighties, since Bao and I are the same age and grew up in the same era, albeit in different parts of the US. Having just come out of drawing my own family for my memoir, I kind of superimposed my own dad onto Bao's dad, and what came out is an amalgam. Sorry, Bác!"

Every time I reread A Different Pond to my now page-flipping nine-month-old daughter, I think of the memories that Thi and Bao have shared through their work and wonder what the baby will remember most from her childhood. I hope that reading will be one of many positive recollections. With that, I leave you with Thi and Bao's most memorable lesson from their own parents:

Bao: "I was fortunate in that my parents told me a lot of things, even as I was younger, including some pretty traumatizing things about war and Vietnam, and I saw first hand the violence, discrimination, and bigotry they had to face in this country. I am thankful that they endured, thankful that they found a way to support us in this incredibly hostile environment."

Thi: "My parents taught me that you can do a lot with very little. They're not big on proverbs, so this is just a lesson I learned by watching them. What I actually hear in my head is Nina Simone singing that song from Hair, 'I Got Life.'"

CONTRIBUTOR BIO

Jade Hidle holds an MFA in creative writing from CSU Long Beach and a PhD in literature from UC San Diego. She is a faculty member in the Letters Department at MiraCosta College. Her non-fiction has been collected in a book titled The Return to Viet Nam, released by Transcurrent Press. Her work has also appeared in the Columbia Journal, New Delta Review, International Journal of Comic Art, and The Ethnic Studies Review.

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A Conversation about A Different Pond with Bao Phi and Thi Bui

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Contributing writer Jade Hidle reflects on the role of reading in her own childhood, and speaks to Bao Phi and Thi Bui about their Caldecott Honor illustrated children's book, A Different Pond. When I was a young reader, books served a specific function in the relationship between my single mother and me.

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A 2018 Caldecott Honor Book that Kirkus Reviews calls "a must-read for our times," A Different Pond is an unforgettable story about a simple event - a long-ago fishing trip. Graphic novelist Thi Bui and acclaimed poet Bao Phi deliver a powerful, honest glimpse into a relationship between father and son - and between cultures, old and new. As a young boy, Bao and his father awoke early, hours before his father's long workday began, to fish on the shores of a small pond in Minneapolis. Unlike many other anglers, Bao and his father fished for food, not recreation. A successful catch meant a fed family. Between hope-filled casts, Bao's father told him about a different pond in their homeland of Vietnam. Thi Bui's striking, evocative art paired with Phi's expertly crafted prose has earned this powerful picture books six starred reviews and numerous awards.

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A 2018 Caldecott Honor Book that Kirkus Reviews calls "a must-read for our times," A Different Pond is an unforgettable story about a simple event - a long-ago fishing trip. Graphic novelist Thi Bui and acclaimed poet Bao Phi deliver a powerful, honest glimpse into a relationship between father and son - and between cultures, old and new.

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Leo Espinosa's illustration and design studio

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It seems unlikely that, at this point, you haven't seen Junot Díaz and Leo Espinosa's picture book Islandborn. It's a book that feels ubiquitous these days, and for good reason: not only is the message timely, but it's thought-provoking, too, allowing readers who don't necessarily have the same experiences as the character Lola to put themselves in a position of asking where they came from and how their heritage informs who they are today. If you haven't listened to Junot's Keynote Speech from Winter Institute earlier this year you should (and that can be found ), but today we're here to talk about the illustrations in the book because, as amazing as the text is, Islandborn wouldn't be what it is without Leo's visuals. Have a look.

Every kid in Lola's school was from somewhere else.

Hers was a school of faraway places.

So when Lola's teacher asks the students to draw a picture of where their families immigrated from, all the kids are excited. Except Lola. She can't remember The Island--she left when she was just a baby. But with the help of her family and friends and their memories--joyous, fantastical, heartbreaking, and frightening--Lola's imagination takes her on an extraordinary journey back to The Island. As she draws closer to the heart of her family's story, Lola comes to understand the truth of her abuela's words: "Just because you don't remember a place doesn't mean it's not in you."

Peek underneath the dust jacket

Let's talk Leo Espinosa!

LTPB: Let's start by talking about Islandborn. What kind of research did you do (factually and visually) to get the images right? How did you mix in the realities of your research with your own unique art style?

LE: I did my own research but also got help from Junot and the team at Dial Books about specific elements in the story. We spent a lot of time getting the characters right, and that means having the right hair styles, skin tones, clothes, etc.

I lived in New York City for close to a decade and I'm very familiar with its architecture, so that came in handy when working on Lola's neighborhood. For the vegetation and anything else that represented the Dominican Republic, I had my own memories of Colombia, where I grew up, and was lucky enough to travel to Hawaii when I was first working on sketches, so I drew and took plenty of photos during that trip.

Obviously Google is a tremendous tool to complement and verify that all my references are correct; for instance, I wanted to have the right kind of whales that are mentioned in the story and Google was the only way I could find that out.

LTPB: What is the first thing you do when you get a new project? Do you make a conscious effort to create different types of illustrations for different types of books?

LE: I've been trying to be somewhat consistent with the last books I've made, but if I have to alter the way I normally illustrate in benefit of the story, I do it. One good example is all the tropical elements in Islandborn that represent Lola's imagination and her own idea of The Island she doesn't remember. These elements appear every time The Island is mentioned, and because they "grow" around Lola's busy neighborhood, they needed to look strikingly different. My solution was to render all those elements with digital watercolors, brighter tones, and loose brushstrokes that I wouldn't use otherwise.

LTPB: What did you use to create the illustrations in this book? How does your process change from book to book?

LE: I use pencil on paper for my sketches and Photoshop for color. That's pretty much the same for all books. The only thing that changes at the beginning of each one of them is the way I approach Photoshop; my new motto is "get to where you want to go, but find a different path this time." That allows me to improvise, learn, and grow as an artist while avoiding boring repetition.

LTPB: What are you working on now? Anything you can show us?

LE: Sorry, I cannot show you anything yet, but I'm working on illustrations for a children's product, doing art direction for a short video, and starting on a new book pretty soon.

LTPB: If you were to write a picture book autobiography, who would you want to illustrate it (dead or alive!), and why?

LE: What a strange but wonderful question! Alive, my good friend Bob Staake because of his storytelling and great understanding of design. He also will improve my poor writing. Dead, Morislav Sasek, because I would die to see his drawings of the places I've lived in.

Special thanks to Leo and Dial Books for use of these images!

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Let's Talk Illustrators #64: Leo Espinosa

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It seems unlikely that, at this point, you haven't seen Junot Díaz and Leo Espinosa 's picture book Islandborn . It's a book that feels ubiquitous these days, and for good reason: not only is the message timely, but it's thought-provoking, too, allowing readers who don't necessarily have the same experiences as the character Lola to put themselves in a position of asking where they came from and how their heritage informs who they are today.

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Islandborn / Lola: Edicion en espanol de ISLANDBORN

Written by Junot Díaz , illustrated by Leo Espinosa

Published by Dial Books

ISBN: 978-0735229860 (English)/ ISBN: 978-0525552819 (Spanish)
Book Review
"Every kid in Lola's school was from somewhere else. Hers was the school of faraway places." But when her teacher asks her class to draw a picture of their first country, Lola is stuck. She left "the Island" when she was a baby, and doesn't have any memories of her own. With the guidance of her older cousin, Lola sets off on an afternoon quest to gather the memories of the adults in her neighborhood who remember their first home in the Dominican Republic: bats as big as blankets; music, everywhere; mangoes so sweet they make you cry; rainbow people in "every shade ever made;" and beaches as beautiful as poetry. Not all island memories are happy ones; hurricanes arrive, and monsters lurk, specifically during the violent mid-20th century dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo. In his debut picture book, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Junot Díaz, himself a part of the Dominican Diaspora, tells the story of Lola's quest with his trademark humor ("Abuela called downstairs and shouted at Mrs. Mir, who then shouted at Mr. Mir. The old people were always shouting at each other; that's how they talked.") and a deep respect for young people's intuitive ways of understanding complexity. Espinosa's mixed media illustrations merge memory and imagination in joyful portraits. At the turning point, they also represent unspeakable horror, and honor human fortitude and resilience. Islandborn, bursting with bright colors, is a love song to immigrant communities everywhere, a saccharine-free celebration of diversity, a mirror for children in schools brimming with recent arrivals, and a tatalyzing peak at such cultural richness and possibility for those whose schools are less diverse. Ideal for classrooms, libraries, afterschool programs, camps, and bedtime read alouds around the country and around the world, this book seems to offer limitless possibilities to explore family, community, immigration, identity, and intergenerational connections.
Teaching Ideas & Invitations
Class Book on Your Community. In Islandborn , Lola learns about "the Island" through her family and neighbors. What is your community like? Draw upon the five senses to help students brainstorm what they know and love about your corner of the world. What colors fill your neighborhood, village, town, city, or county? What smells permeate the air and why? What animals surprise you? What kinds of music can you hear, from both the natural and human worlds? Have students create a lovesong to your community, in the form of a class book, to describe what is special to your students.

Art as Expression: The Power of Drawing. In Islandborn , Lola reveals how much she has learned about "the Island" and its monster by drawing. There are important developmental benefits to drawing and creating art. Educators and art therapists understand that children can draw what they know and feel even when, or especially when, they don't have words to do so. We know that students draw before they learn to write, and often learn to encode before they decode. Foster a spirit of creative communication and visual literacy by establishing a regular time for drawing in your classroom each day. Conference with a few students each day to learn more about their drawings, taking pictures with your phone or tablet to document their work over the course of the year, and the connections that you make to their overall literacy development. Such work is beneficial to students who are native speakers of English and Emerging Biligual/Trilingual students.

Learning about Lola's Community. After reading Islandborn , what do your students now want to know about "the Island?" Some of you may be in classrooms with many students of Dominican descent, and some of you may be in classrooms with none. Explore the Dominican Republic by learning more together, drawing on the resources below and the people in your community who are part of the Dominican Diaspora. Explore pictures and video clips that you can find online. Have a community member come in to tell his or her memories about life in the Dominican Republic. What can you learn about the fruits and vegetables that grow there? What are some traditional Dominican ? What about Dominican and the ? Cook and taste some traditional recipes, listen to Dominican music, and have your class dance the meringue.

Grades 2 and Up

Stories of Elders. In Islandborn , Lola asks kids, adults, and senior citizens in her neighborhood what they remember from the Island. It is only the seniors, her abuela and Mr. Mir, the superintendent of her apartment building, who share the scary memories. What memories, happy and sad, might the elders in community have to share? What are your students curious about? Brainstorm a list of questions that your students might ask the seniors, to generate prompts. Or, if you are working with older students, select prompts from cards from Storymatic Studios to generate prompts. Invite a group of senior citizens to visit your class. Some may live in the local neighborhood around your school, some may visit from a nearby senior citizen's community center or home, and some may be the friends and family of your students. Match each student or pairs of students with a senior. Use tablets, laptops, or phones to document the stories the elders tell. Have students write and illustrate those stories, documenting the time and place in which they took place, and publish a class book. Once finished, ask your students connections or themes they see across the different stories and settings?

Where is Your Class From? After reading Islandborn , have students share where they and their families come from, going back several generations. Create a questionnaire to support students and their families in identifying the different places in which they have lived. In the spirit of inclusion, have a range of anchor charts posted around the room, and have students document where they were born and where they have lived, where their parents grew-up, where their grandparents grew-up, and where their ancestors came from or may have come from. Support students in creating a map of the world in which they document all the places that their families have touched.

Migration Solar System. Read across a range of texts that focus on the process of leaving a place you love to arrive somewhere new. You can explore the historical The Place You Know First by Patricia Maclachlan, as well as recent immigration stories such as Here I Am by Patti Kim, I'm New Here b y Anne Sibley O'Brien, or picture books that represent the refugee experience . Have students compare and contrast the different experiences that people have when they move from one town to another, one state to another, or one country to another, and the different reasons why those moves may happen.

Grades 5 and Up

Local History: Native Americans and Immigration Waves. Islandborn is based on a school in Washington Heights in northern Manhattan, so named because there was a Fort Washington there during the American Revolution. Originally, the lived in Manhatta. After European contact, waves of Dutch and British colonizers began to arrive in Manhattan, followed by successive waves of other immigrants from around the world. Who has lived where you and your students live? Who were the Native Americans who originally populated your region? Reach out to local Native leaders, and have them speak to your class in person or via Skype. As an educator, explore information about The National Congress of Native Americans , stay abreast of current news via the Indian Country Media Network of the National Congress , and find high-quality and accurate books to share with your class as vetted by the American Indians in Children's Literature blog and the American Indian Youth Literature Award . Next, work with your local public library and local historical society to identify the waves of immigrants to your region after the European contact. Over the course of the school year, have students write a local history of the people who have lived in your community and the ways in which those different populations have interacted with one another.

Naming and Symbols. Why is the Dominican Republic never named in Islandborn ? Why is the monster never revealed as dictator Rafael Trujillo? What are Diaz and Espinosa doing with their words and pictures? How does the symbolic serve the narrative better than the literal? Have your students discuss these ideas and then brainstorm the take-aways for their own fiction writing.

The Trujillo Regime. Use Islandborn as a scaffolded introduction to Dominican history for middle grade students. Next, have students read Julia Alvarez's historical novel Before We Were Free , about life during the Trujillo dictatorship. After reading the novel, have students learn more through other . Next, have them interview community members who fled the Dominican Republic during that time.
Critical Literacy
Creating "The School of Faraway Places." Perhaps you and your students, like Lola, are lucky enough to spend your time in the "School of Faraway Places," with children from around the world. In a recent NPR interview, author Junot Díaz shared that the school in Islandborn is based on a school he worked with for many years in Washington Heights in northern Manhattan, part of the Dominican Diaspora. Are all New York City public schools as diverse as Lola's? How diverse are schools in the largest school district in the country, with over one million young people? How does New York City define diversity ? Read about the city's latest efforts to combat segregation. Will the plan work? What do other organizations have to say, such as the Citizens Committee for Children and the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School ? Have students conduct research, with the help of your school and local librarians, on the ways in which schools have been successful at fostering diversity. What lessons do your students take from this conversation that they can apply to local district?

"Radical Hope is Our Best Weapon." Islandborn is a celebration of identity. While the audience for the book may not be middle school students, use it as a catalyst for some deep thinking about identity in this time of crisis and change within the United States and around the world. In a recent interview with , Junot Díaz said that we frequently use a "deficit model" about immigration, focusing on what immigrants' home countries have. He reminds us that "[t]here's also the fact a lot of people come because political realities have uprooted them, have driven them from their homes." This fall, Díaz's appearance on the "On Being" radio show was entitled " Radical Hope is Our Best Weapon. " The podcast is too mature for most middle grade audiences and too political for most public schools. Within the conversation, he says that "Our multiplicity is our damn strength.....I think from the bottom will the genius come that makes our ability to live with each other possible. I believe that with all my heart." As your students to consider and identify their personal multiplicities. Who are they? As defined by whom? Why? What are our multiplicities as a nation? As defined by whom? What does it mean that we are living through a global refugee crisis and the United States so reluctant to let refugees in? What is prompting so many people to leave their home countries? What do we stand to lose by taking this stance? How will we make "living with one another possible?" What "radical hope" do your students have as they look at the world right now? Have students sift through these big ideas to arrive at the personal narratives that they choose to write.
Further Explorations Junot Diaz Official Website Leo Espinosa Official Website NPR Interview with Junot Diaz 3/12/18 Washington Post Interview with Junot Diaz 3/9/18 CBS Television Interview with Junot Diaz Dominican Republic, BBC News NYC's Micro Neighborhoods: Little Dominican Republic in Washington Heights "Music and Dance of the Dominican Republic," The United Nations, UNESCO

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Islandborn/Lola: Edicion en espanol de ISLANDBORN Written by Junot Díaz, illustrated by Leo Espinosa Published by Dial Books ISBN: 978-0735229860 (English)/ISBN: 978-0525552819 (Spanish) All Ages Book Review "Every kid in Lola's school was from somewhere else. Hers was the school of faraway places." But when her teacher asks her class to draw a picture of [...]

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Junot Díaz wanted to write a children's book for more than 20 years. In the meantime, he wrote several grown-up books, including The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2008. He also won a MacArthur "Genius" Grant, among other accolades.

Now he has finished that children's book. Islandborn isabout a curious, Afro-Caribbean girl named Lola.

"She is an immigrant who came over so young, she has no memories of the land that she left behind," Díaz says. "And of course she is surrounded by a community that talks endlessly about the island."

She's about 6 years old, the age Díaz was when he and his family fled to the U.S. from the Dominican Republic, which was torn apart by the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo. Islandborn, illustrated by Leo Espinosa, follows Lola's quest to find out about the mysterious nation.

Interview Highlights
On what inspires Lola to find out more about the Dominican Republic
A teacher, you know, Ms. Obi, challenges them to draw a picture of their first home because Lola is in a school called "the school of faraway places," and all the children in her school are immigrants. But Lola, of course, doesn't have any memories. And so she and her teacher start devising a way that she be able to find a way to draw a picture by talking to and reaching out to the people around her who do remember.
On how she begins to reconstruct the island
Well, she gets into dialogue. I think what's interesting is that the - often the questions of young people, you know, in some ways, they create an invitation for older people who have spent a lot of time sustaining certain kinds of silences. You know, if you're in a family that has silences, a young person can sort of zero in on them and say, "Hey. Whatever happened to X?" Or "What is Y about?" She, in her very innocent and curious and energetic way, creates an opportunity for the community to have a reckoning with some of the history which it's attempting to distance or disavow.
On how older people explain Trujillo's dictatorship to her
Well, you know, one thing is sure is that there's a number of tactics. You have some folks trying to discourage her, other folks trying to shut the door, but her persistence wins the day. And eventually someone sits down with her - Mr. Mir - and explains to her in highly metaphorical language, but I think [in] more honest and some ways more impactful than if he'd given her just a clinical description of it.
On describing Trujillo as a "monster" and the line "That's why we're all here."
When we look at the discourses around immigration, it's always this deficit model: "We didn't have anything at home" or "We had less at home, and so we came here for more opportunities." OK, that's very, very comforting. There's also the fact a lot of people come because political realities have uprooted them, have driven them from their homes.
On Trujillo's dictatorship
I think he's like most authoritarian, near-totalitarian dictators. There was no safety for people or families. Today, you could be walking down the street, and somebody who had Trujillo's ear would want your house, and the next thing you know, you would be out of it. There was constant murder, constant torture. This was also a racial dictatorship, a violently Jim Crow-type dictatorship where people of dark skin, their lives were made much more difficult than the light-skinned people. It was a very bad period.
On how much Lola understands about the Dominican Republic by the end of the book
I would argue that young people are far more sophisticated than any adult gives them credit for. Adults are always imagining children to be less sophisticated than they really are. Lola, I think, is sophisticated. I think, as we see in the book, that she's taken Mr. Mir's story about this political monstrosity that's seized her island to heart. It allows her, in some ways, to connect to her family more deeply and to herself, and ultimately leaves her far more - at least in my mind - leaves her in a better place than she was when she started.
Catherine Whelan and Jessica Smith produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Sydnee Monday adapted it for the Web.

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In Junot Diaz's 'Islandborn,' A Curious Child Re-Creates Her Dominican Roots

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Junot Díaz wanted to write a children's book for more than 20 years. In the meantime, he wrote several grown-up books, including The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2008. He also won a MacArthur "Genius" Grant, among other accolades. Now he has finished that children's book.

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The new children's book Islandborn by Junot Díaz tells the story of a young girl, Lola, who learns from family and friends about the island where she was born. The island is not named in the book, but readers can deduce that the story is based on the history of the Dominican Republic.

"Every kid in Lola's school was from somewhere else," the book opens. "Hers was the school of faraway places." Lola was brought to the United States as a baby, therefore she has no memories from the island. When her teacher asks the class to draw a picture of "the country you were originally from, your first country," Lola asks family and friends in the neighborhood what they remember most about the country where she was born. The stories paint a picture of life on the island and the forces that led her family to leave such a wonderful place. Leo Espinosa's illustrations of people beautifully affirm a range of skin colors and Afro-Latinx identity. This diversity and genuine representation are rare in children's books.

There is so much to love about this book. The writing is lyrical with a child reader in mind. Just how hot is the island? "The heat is on you like five bullies." How shy is Lola in class? "She hated raising her hand almost as much as she hated Nelson's yelling."

Most important of all, Islandborn is the only one of dozens of new books on immigration that explains in an age-appropriate way why people are forced to leave their home countries. When Lola hears so many wonderful stories about the island, she asks the obvious question, "Then why did they come to the U.S.?" Finally, the building superintendent explains to her that "A monster fell upon our poor Island. . . It could destroy an entire town with a single word and made a whole family disappear simply by looking at it." By describing the dictator Trujillo as a monster, Díaz introduces a brutal and essential political history; a history that upends the deficit narrative around immigration and highlights the push factors. He opens the door for conversation with children about the complex reasons for immigration. All too often, this essential part of the story is reserved for the author's note on the end pages. Islandborn is a Harvest of Empire for young children.

We are proud of the role of Teaching for Change played to make this excellent book even better. When an advance copy arrived at our office in January, we were dismayed to see that that the monster was illustrated as a black bat in an ominous sky. One more time, the message was that black is bad and scary. We quickly consulted with our colleagues in the See What We See network who all agreed the illustration was problematic.

Teaching for Change contacted Díaz and the publisher, Dial Books for Young Readers (a division of Penguin Books) with our concerns that the affirmation of racial identity in the beautiful illustrations throughout the book would get undone by the "black is bad" monster. Especially in contrast to the other "good" bats throughout the rest of the book that are drawn in a myriad of other colors.

We were delighted that Dial Books took the major step, just one month away from the book's release, of revising the illustrations of the monster throughout the book. We were told this involved destroying tens of thousands of books already in print and issuing a new printing in English and Spanish.

The new version of the book portrays the monster as green rather than black.

While it is a dramatic improvement, we hope that children's book illustrators consider making monsters in even lighter colors. (This would be a good student assignment for art classes-convey to the viewer that an orange or pink monster is scary.)

In addition to describing the monster, the building superintendent also describes the people's resistance. "Heroes rose up. Strong smart women just like you, Lola, and a few strong smart young men, too." Díaz is likely referring to the Mirabal sisters and many others who fought for an end to the U.S.-backed dictatorship in the Dominican Republic.

One place where young readers could handle a more accurate narrative is in the description of what happened to those heroes. Lola was told, "No one knows really [what happened to them.] It was so long ago." The truth is that we actually do know what happened to the Mirabal sisters and countless others who challenged the Trujillo dictatorship. A response that children could handle would be "Sadly, many were killed, but others survived. Their children, like you, continue to work for a better world today."

While all the references throughout the book indicate that the Dominican Republic is the island, it is never named. Díaz has explained in public events that he intentionally left the island unnamed so that the reader could bring their imagination to the story. He adds that there are monsters in many countries and there are many kinds of monsters (not all are dictators); he wanted this story to be about more than one place or experience.

However, all too often places and people are generalized in children's literature, particularly with respect to people of color. Children's books reference " Africa" rather than naming a country or reference "Native Americans" rather than naming an American Indian nation. While we appreciate Díaz's rationale, we think it would be better to name the place and in an afterword note that there countless related stories in countries around the world, particularly where the U.S. has intervened.

Overall, this is one of the best and most important children's books to have been published in quite some time. We hope it sets a new standard for illustrations of skin color, for poetic writing, and for addressing a relevant topic in a sophisticated yet child-friendly way. We look forward to the forthcoming sequel.

Related stories

A similar concern was raised in 2017 about The Bad Mood and the Stick. Librarian Edith Campbell published a blog called " I Am Not Your Bad Mood."The publisher changed the image before the official release of the book.

A critique of My Beautiful Birds led to a response from the publisher, but no change to the representation of blackness as something evil to escape.

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Junot Díaz's Islandborn: Before and After - Social Justice Books

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The new children's book Islandborn by Junot Díaz tells the story of a young girl, Lola, who learns from family and friends about the island where she was born. The island is not named in the book, but readers can deduce that the story is based on the history of the Dominican Republic.

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Islandborn by Junot Díaz: 9780735229860 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

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From New York Times bestseller and Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Díaz comes a debut picture book about the magic of memory and the infinite power of the imagination. A 2019 Pura Belpré Honor...

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Anika Aldamuy Denise, Award-winning children's book author

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Stories with heart... and a little sazón, including the multi-award-winning Planting Stories, Phenomenal AOC, A Girl Named Rosita, Gato Guapo

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Review by Dora M. Guzmán
DESCRIPTION OF THE BOOK: Follow la vida y el legado of Pura Belpré, the first Puerto Rican librarian in New York City.

When she came to America in 1921, Pura carried the cuentos folkloricos of her Puerto Rican homeland. Finding a new home at the New York Public Library as a bilingual assistant, she turned her popular retellings into libros and spread seeds across the land. Today, these seeds have grown into a lush landscape as generations of children and storytellers continue to share her tales and celebrate Pura's legacy.

This portrait of the influential librarian, author, and puppeteer reminds us of the power of storytelling and the extraordinary woman who opened doors and championed bilingual literature.

MY TWO CENTS: Another bilingual favorite to add to the informational biography shelf! Pura Belpré is widely known for the book award created in her honor through the American Library Association. Every year, the Pura Belpré Award is one that recognizes Latinx authors and illustrators that reflect the Latinx culture in their picture books or novels.

Pura Belpré had seeds of determination and passion that followed her from Puerto Rico. That same blessing led her to work in a library and share her stories with children, however, she quickly discovered that many of her own stories, reflective of her Puerto Rican culture, were not readily available to the community. Therefore, she begins to share her stories with children and then begins to write down all her stories for others to read. Soon after, she is telling her stories all around the world. This biographical account of Pura's life story and life's work is nothing short of inspirational. Pura unequivocally shares her passion for storytelling to all so that her stories and culture are not lost. Despite losing her best friend and husband, she returns to the library scene while also inspiring others, and sees her seeds of storytelling and Latinx culture, come to fruition.

The sentence structures are concise but impactful as they tell the story, almost in a poetic form, of inspiration and passion as Pura moves to a role within the library. The reader is mesmerized in her storytelling and how certain words stand out with the use of a brushstroke. Words and phrases in Spanish are realistically embraced within the narrative structure, so much that it flows and might go unnoticed. The sharp, bold, multicolored background brings life to the determining force behind Pura's life and purpose with books and libraries. The illustrator perfectly captures the authenticity of the story through its detailed illustrations and placement of characters and scenes. The illustrations dance around the entire page, which keeps the reader involved as the story progresses. Certain illustrations, like the simple flowers and musical notes, follow Pura as she shares her stories across the pages. The additional final pages also provide extensive references to text and film for further research in Pura's lifework, as well as Latinx culture, especially the Puerto Rican culture.

Overall, a perfect addition, in both English and Spanish, to your biography shelf, especially highlighting the power of small, yet meaningful actions and how it evolves into a movement across Latinx and book cultures.

TEACHING TIPS: Many of these teaching moments can be implemented in a grades K-5 setting, with a focus on the primary grades.

Teaching descriptive vocabulary words and phrases

Focus on character traits, especially traits describing Pura throughout the story

Focus on the illustrator's purpose of using certain colors or placement of illustrations to convey meaning

This book can also be combined in a biographical unit of inspirational storytellers or librarians.

Students can also be invited to research more of Pura Belpré's lifework, as well as the impact of the Pura Belpré award on books.

To learn more about the Pura Belpré Medal and find the latest winners and honors, check out the ALA's Pura Belpr é Award home page.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Anika Aldamuy Denise first heard the stories of Pura Belpré from her titi Rose, who, like Pura's family, enjoyed sharing the treasured folklore of Puerto Rico. Today, Anika is the celebrated author of several picture books, including Starring Carmen!, Lights, Camera, Carmen!, and Monster Trucks. She lives with her husband and three daughters in Rhode Island. Other new titles coming in 2019 include The Best Part of Middle illustrated by Christopher Denise, and The Love Letter illustrated by Lucy Ruth Cummins.Visit her online at www.anikadenise.com.

ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR: Paola Escobar grew up traveling from town to town in Colombia. From a very young age she liked to draw the stories her grandmother Clara told about her ancestors, the countryside, and animals. Today, Paola is an illustrator who is passionate about telling stories of her own, having published with SM Spain, Planeta, Norma, and more. She lives very happily in Bogota, Colombia, with her husband and their dog, Flora. Follow her on Instagram here!

ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Dora M. Guzmán is a bilingual reading specialist for grades K-3 and also teaches an undergraduate college course in Children's Literature. When she is not sharing her love of reading with her students, you can find her in the nearest library, bookstore, or online, finding more great reads to add to her never ending "to read" pile!

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Book Review: Planting Stories: The Life of Librarian and Storyteller Pura Belpré / Sembrando Historias: Pura Belpré bibliotecaria y narradora de cuentos

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Review by Dora M. Guzmán DESCRIPTION OF THE BOOK: Follow la vida y el legado of Pura Belpré, the first Puerto Rican librarian in New York City. When she came to America in 1921, Pura carried the cuentos folkloricos of her Puerto Rican homeland. Finding a new home at the New York Public Library...

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Pura Belpré was a Puerto Rican storyteller and folklorist. She built on her love of stories in her career as a librarian at the New York Public Library and as an author. This teaching guide presents a curriculum map for K-12 educators that assumes students will view the documentary about the life and work of Pura Belpré entitled Pura Belpré, Storyteller, and read some of her fiction. As a result of studying about her life, students will understand how Belpré contributed to children's education and literacy development in New York.

This teaching guide was developed to respond to 2 essential questions:

1. What do we know about the folklore carried to the U.S. by Puerto Rican migrants? And,

2. What are the contributions of Puerto Rican migrants to the cultural, intellectual and daily life of cities in which they settled such as New York City?

Documentary

Produced by: Center for Puerto Rican Studies
Directed by: Eduardo Aguiar
Pura Belpré: Storyteller (DVD)
Pura Belpré, New York City's first Puerto Rican/Latina librarian, was an ambassador for the New York Public Library's work with the Latino community. The innovative storyteller used puppetry, arts and crafts as tools to teach kids to read, write and express themselves and transformed a community.

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Pura Belpré Documentary & Teaching Guide

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Pura Belpré was a Puerto Rican storyteller and folklorist. She built on her love of stories in her career as a librarian at the New York Public Library and as an author. This teaching guide presents a curriculum map for K-12 educators that assumes students will view the documentary about the life and work of Pura Belpré entitled Pura Belpré, Storyteller, and read some of her fiction.

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1. All Episodes

2. Planting Stories: The Life of Librarian and Storyteller Pura Belpré

An inspiring picture book biography of storyteller, puppeteer, and New York City's first Puerto Rican librarian, who championed bilingual literature. Brought to colorful life by Paola Escobar's elegant and exuberant illustrations and Anika Aldamuy Denise's lyrical text.
More Picturebooking with Anika and her books.
This podcast is made possible through the generosity of our picturebooking members . Thank you.

To become a member visit patreon.com/picturebooking and receive access to my entire talk with Anika.

Thank you for listening to the show today.

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The Picturebooking Podcast: Creating, Publishing and Marketing Children’s Picture Book Stories with Nick Patton

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Planting Stories: The Life of Librarian and Storyteller Pura Belpré

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An inspiring picture book biography of storyteller, puppeteer, and New York City's first Puerto Rican librarian, who championed bilingual literature. Brought to colorful life by Paola Escobar's elegant and exuberant illustrations and Anika Aldamuy Denise's lyrical text. More Picturebooking with Anika and her books. This podcast is made possible through the generosity of our picturebooking members.

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*Junior Library Guild Selection* "An appealing tribute and successful remedy to the lack of titles about the groundbreaking librarian...a must-have for all libraries." -School Library Journal (starred review)
An inspiring picture book biography of storyteller, puppeteer, and New York City's first Puerto Rican librarian, who championed bilingual literature.

When she came to America in 1921, Pura Belpré carried the cuentos folklóricos of her Puerto Rican homeland. Finding a new home at the New York Public Library as a bilingual assistant, she turned her popular retellings into libros and spread story seeds across the land. Today, these seeds have grown into a lush landscape as generations of children and storytellers continue to share her tales and celebrate Pura's legacy.

Brought to colorful life by Paola Escobar's elegant and exuberant illustrations and Anika Aldamuy Denise's lyrical text, this gorgeous book is perfect for the pioneers in your life.

Informative backmatter and suggested further reading included.

A Spanish-language edition, Sembrando historias: Pura Belpré: bibliotecaria y narradora de cuentos, is also available.
"Anika Aldamuy Denise's intimate telling captures the magical, folk-tale feeling of Belpré's own stories. Her lyrical text, sprinkled like fairy dust with Spanish words, begs to be read aloud, while Paola Escobar's stylishly detailed and warmly expressive illustrations capture the joy of sharing stories." -New York Times Book Review

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Planting Stories: The Life of Librarian and Storyteller Pura Belpré - Anika Aldamuy Denise - Hardcover

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Junior Library Guild Selection* "An appealing tribute and successful remedy to the lack of titles about the groundbreaking librarian...a must-have for all libraries." - School Library Journal (starred review) An inspiring picture book biography of storyteller, puppeteer, and New York City's first Puerto Rican librarian, who championed bilingual literature.

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author: Jairo Buitrago

illustrator: Rafael Yockteng

Groundwood Books / House of Anansi Press, 2016

On the cover is a little girl, comfortably lying down with her head resting on her papá's leg. Her body is relaxed and her eyes are wide open; she's happily playing with her toy bunny. Papá is sitting upright, leaning on his backpack. He's looking warily into the distance.

Towards the middle of the story, readers will see that Papá and daughter are riding on the top of a train. They are refugees, fleeing for their lives, fleeing to El Norte, hitching rides on one of the old, rusted-out trains they call "La Bestia" ("the beast"), but this child does not know any of this. All she knows is that she's with her papá who loves her, and that's all that counts.

And she counts: "Cuando viajamos" (When we travel), she says, happily riding on Papá's shoulders, "yo cuento lo que veo" (I count what I see). She sadly counts the hens and chicks, as she says goodbye; she counts the cows, being led away by a new owner; she counts "un burrito aburrido, y cincuenta pájaros en el cielo" (one little bored donkey and fifty birds in the sky), as she and Papá and a coyote watch people load all their belongings on makeshift rafts; she counts the people who live by the train tracks, as they wait for La Bestia to take them to El Norte; and she counts the clouds, which take on the many shapes of a child's imagination. Throughout, the little girl is all energy and fascination, while Papá watches for danger.

The center spread shows the reason for Papá's fear: Here, border patrol agents have stopped the train and are pulling people out. As they handcuff and arrest some, Papá and daughter and others-accompanied by the coyote-are running for their lives.

On almost every double-page spread, readers will see a coyote and sometimes more than one. They are "chuchos" ("mutts"), as Papá calls them. They represent the human smugglers who, for an exorbitant price, accompany the undocumented refugees, sometimes hundreds of miles and sometimes on foot-to reach El Norte. Sometimes coyotes bring the refugees all the way to a safe place and sometimes they abandon them, on their own, often without food or water, in the middle of the desert. The lives of refugees are far from safe and the trip is often deadly dangerous.

Yesterday, three youngsters who had a chance to read this book almost dropped it when they realized that the "chuchos" were coyotes. Their father was a refugee from Mexico, and their mother had told them who the "coyotes" are. Young children who are not part of refugee families-and even some who are-may not readily understand all of the symbolism in these illustrations. (The reviewer from Kirkus didn't, either.) But all Maribel, Amelia, and Anthony needed was a brief explanation from their mother about "symbolism"-and they were off!

As they read the story and looked carefully at the artwork, the children noticed and were able to answer questions posed by the large details: "Now the papá and daughter look sad. Are they saying goodbye to their hens and chicks? Did they sell their cows to that white guy?" "Why are they talking to the "chucho"? "Where are they going on the rafts?" "Why do all those people live by the train tracks?" "Why are they climbing on the train?" "Why are the papá and daughter and their friends running away?" At first, Maribel had figured it out and explained it to Amelia and Anthony. But very soon, the younger ones "got" the symbolism and effectively explained them to each other.

The small details didn't escape these kids, either: "Why is that cop (border control) grabbing that man's wrist?" "Why does that woman look ashamed?" "Why are the people in handcuffs?" "Why do all the cops have rifles?" "Why are the cops being mean to everyone?"

When Papá and daughter stop at a grocery in a small Mexican town to get temporary employment and pay another "chucho" to lead them further, the daughter plays with the store owner's son; and when it's time to move on, the youngsters trade: her toy bunny for his two white rabbits, whose home is a cardboard box.

In giving up her toy bunny to her new friend, the little girl is trading in her uncertainty for the reality of the two white rabbits, who are going to be free on the other side of the wall. As she and her papá finally cross the border, the child releases the two white rabbits-who on the last double-page spread, with the border wall behind them, scamper off to freedom.

In many ways, the two white rabbits, now free, are symbolic of the courage that it takes for this refugee father and his young daughter to cross the desert and risk their lives in order to get to El Norte. Rabbits are survivors; they signify determination. They're extremely strong and can leap great distances. They can squeeze under fences and-as Maribel, Amelia and Anthony noted-dig underground tunnels. Their sharp vision can detect predators from all directions. They have intimate knowledge of their surroundings and know how to forage for food.

As Maribel, Amelia, and Anthony quickly figured out when I asked them who the white rabbits were, they said, almost in unison: "Papá and the little girl."

Yockteng created the sketches in pencil, which he then scanned and digitally colored and outlined. The result is stunning, with a muted palette of mostly browns, blues and greens that create a sort-of sameness, complementing the story and highlighting the long journey on which all there is for the child to do is to count-and dream. Buitrago and Yockteng have intentionally left the place, which may be Mexico or anywhere in Central America, ambiguous. That's because, as IBBY Foundation President Patricia Aldana writes in a brief Afterword, "close to a hundred thousand children from Central America make the very dangerous trip you see here to find safety and a way to survive in the United States," and this small family could represent any of them.

Originally written in Spanish and seamlessly translated into English, Dos conejos blancos // Two White Rabbits is brilliant, profound and heartbreaking-and highly recommended. (Note: I listed this book as appropriate for all grades because it can be effectively read in preschool- through undergraduate levels, as well as in courses such as Early Childhood Education, Children's Literature, and Library Science.)

Muchísimas gracias a mi amiga y colega, Judy Zalazar Drummond, who introduced me to her grandchildren, Maribel Linda, Amelia Edosia, and Anthony, and to their mom, Melissa-and to the children, for allowing me to see this beautiful story through their eyes.

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Dos conejos blancos // Two White Rabbits

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author: Jairo Buitrago illustrator: Rafael Yockteng Groundwood Books / House of Anansi Press, 2016 On the cover is a little girl, comfortably lying down with her head resting on her papá's leg. Her body is relaxed and her eyes are wide open; she's happily playing with her toy bunny.

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I'm Your Neighbor Books: Immigration Children's Literature

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Two White Rabbits
By Jairo Buitrago
Illustrated by Rafael Yockteng
Published by Groundwood Books

Find a copy at Amazon | IndieBound | B&N

"An important and timely picture book for every library collection." - School Library Journal

Description
In this moving and timely story, a young child describes what it is like to be a migrant as she and her father travel north toward the U.S. border.

They travel mostly on the roof of a train known as The Beast, but the little girl doesn't know where they are going. She counts the animals by the road, the clouds in the sky, the stars. Sometimes she sees soldiers. She sleeps, dreaming that she is always on the move, although sometimes they are forced to stop and her father has to earn more money before they can continue their journey.

As many thousands of people, especially children, in Mexico and Central America continue to make the arduous journey to the U.S. border in search of a better life, this is an important book that shows a young migrant's perspective.

Reviews & Accolades
★ "Hope and hardship coexist in this haunting look at refugees fleeing home in hopes of a safer, more secure life. While strongly suggestive of Mexico, the setting is never mentioned explicitly, nor are the reasons why the young narrator and her father are traveling. For the girl, counting-chickens on the side of the road, people encamped by train tracks-offers a stability that her day-to-day life cannot; numbers are constant, even when you're always on the move. On every step of their journey, which includes fording a muddy river on rafts built on rubber tires and riding atop a rusted-out train, they are joined by a narrow-eyed coyote, a visual metaphor for those who smuggle migrants and refugees across borders, not always with good intentions. Colored in drab browns and blues, Yockteng's illustrations emphasize the closeness between father and daughter without downplaying the dangers they face. Buitrago and Yockteng (who previously collaborated on Jimmy the Greatest!) leave the family's story open-ended, powerfully underscoring the idea that there are few certainties in the life of a refugee."
- Publishers Weekly

★ "A young girl and her father face challenges together as they move from place to place. They travel by foot and by train and are happy to catch a ride with passersby when they can. Sometimes their journey is delayed (or derailed) when they must stop because of soldiers or if father has to earn more money to continue along their way. Told entirely through the sensibility of the child, the narration informs readers that "the people who are taking us don't always take us where we are going." The young girl passes the time by counting the interesting items she sees such as animals, people, clouds, and stars. She is very curious about where they are headed, but never receives an answer to her query. Yet, she is content because she has her daddy and her two white rabbits. This simple, yet poignant picture book beautifully illustrates the life of one migrating family. Set in Central America or Mexico, it shows the arduous journey north to the United States in search of a better life. This book is a great tool for introducing immigration, and can be appreciated on many levels. The digitally created illustrations are detailed and full of expression, telling a story of love, struggle, and determination. VERDICT An important and timely picture book for every library collection."
- School Library Journal

★ "When we travel, I count what we see," this little girl tells readers. She counts hens, cows, "one little bored donkey," and a russet mutt that her father calls a chucho and that joins the two on the road. That one Spanish word and a sign for the frontera constitute some of the few textual clues to the pair's circumstances. Adult readers will see Latin American migrants, probably without papers to judge by the raft they ride across the river and the soldiers they flee. Children will see an adventure that's sometimes thrilling, sometimes boring, sometimes terrifying-how much will depend on how familiar readers are with this perilous trek, but even those from the coziest of homes will detect some. They ride atop boxcars, and they stop while Papá works to make money for the next leg of the journey. They are dark-skinned; their fellow migrants range from pale to dark. The only constants are the chucho, the girl's stuffed bunny, "the way people we meet on the road look at us," and the current of affection that runs between father and daughter. The story does not conclude; it simply ends with the companions "back on the road," now with the titular rabbits. Like the creators' previous book, Jimmy the Greatest (2012), it's a masterpiece of understatement. In leaving readers with much to wonder about, the book packs the most powerful of punches."
- Kirkus Reviews

Groups Represented
Latino / Latina

Themes
Community
Family Relationships
Illegal Immigration
Migrant Life
Refugee Life

Setting
Mexico / Central America (unnamed)

Contributors
Jairo Buitrago
Jairo Buitrago is a children's book author who has collaborated with Rafael Yockteng on several picture books. Together they won the "A la Orilla del Viento" contest (Mexico) and their books have been included on IBBY's Honor List, in the White Ravens Catalogue (Germany) and on Banco del Libro's "Los mejores libros del año" / Best Books of the Year (Venezuela). He lives in Mexico.

Rafael Yockteng
Rafael Yockteng has illustrated a number of children's books, which have been published in Colombia and abroad. His images appear inMessengers of Rain / Mandaderos de la lluvia, an anthology of Latin American poetry, and Trees Are Hanging from the Sky / Los arboles estan colgando del cielo by Jorge Argueta. He lives in Bogotá, Colombia.

Elisa Amado
Elisa Amado is a Guatemalan-born author and translator. She has writtenUn barrilete para el Día de los muertos / Barrilete: A Kite for the Day of the Dead, Cousins (Primas) and Tricycle (El triciclo), which is on the Américas Award Commended List and is a USBBY Outstanding International Book. Her most recent books are What Are You Doing? and Why Are You Doing That?. Elisa lives in Toronto, Ontario.

Engagement Projects
Leave a comment and let us know how you use this title!

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Two White Rabbits By Jairo Buitrago Illustrated by Rafael Yockteng Published by Groundwood Books Find a copy at Amazon | IndieBound | B&N "An important and timely picture book for every library collection." - School Library Journal Description In this moving and timely story, a young child describes what it is like to be a migrant as she and her father travel north toward the U.S.

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$18.95 CAD

32 pages | 8.27 in × 8.86 in
Print Format

About this book

Jairo Buitrago * Rafael Yockteng * Elisa Amado

Educator's Guide ↓

In this moving and timely story, a young child describes what it is like to be a migrant as she and her father travel north toward the US border.

They travel mostly on the roof of a train known as The Beast, but the little girl doesn't know where they are going. She counts the animals by the road, the clouds in the sky, the stars. Sometimes she sees soldiers. She sleeps, dreaming that she is always on the move, although sometimes they are forced to stop and her father has to earn more money before they can continue their journey.

As many thousands of people, especially children, in Mexico and Central America continue to make the arduous journey to the US border in search of a better life, this is an important book that shows a young migrant's perspective.

About the Creators

Jairo Buitrago

Jairo Buitrago is a children's book author who has collaborated with Rafael Yockteng on several picture books, including Jimmy the Greatest! (six starred reviews), Two White Rabbits (three starred reviews) and Walk with Me (three starred reviews, Kirkus Prize shortlist). They won the "A la Orilla del Viento" contest for the Spanish edition of Walk with Me, which was also named to IBBY's Honor List. Their books have also appeared on "Los mejores libros del año" (Venezuela's Banco del Libro), Kirkus Best Books, the Horn Book Fanfare and in the White Ravens Catalogue. Jairo lives in Mexico City.

Rafael Yockteng

Rafael Yockteng has illustrated many highly acclaimed children's books, including Sopa de frijoles / Bean Soup by Jorge Argueta (USBBY Outstanding International Books) and Jimmy the Greatest! (six starred reviews), Two White Rabbits (three starred reviews), Walk with Me (three starred reviews, Kirkus Prize shortlist) and On the Other Side of the Garden (three starred reviews) by Jairo Buitrago. Together, Jairo Buitrago and Rafael Yockteng have won the "A la Orilla del Viento" contest, and their books have been included on IBBY's Honor List, "Los mejores libros del año" (Venezuela's Banco del Libro), Kirkus Best Books, the Horn Book Fanfare and in the White Ravens Catalogue. Rafael lives in Bogotá.

Elisa Amado

Elisa Amado is a Guatemalan-born author and translator. Her books have been on the Américas Award Commended List and on USBBY's Outstanding International Books List. She lives in Toronto.

Awards and Praise

Commended Kirkus Best Picture Books of the Year, 2015

Commended A Bank Street College of Education Best Children's Book of the Year, 2016

Commended NCTE Charlotte Huck Award for Outstanding Fiction for Children, Recommended Book, 2015

Commended School Library Journal Best Picture Books of the Year, 2015

Commended Notable Books for a Global Society, 2016

Commended USBBY Outstanding International Books, 2016

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In this moving and timely story, a young child describes what it is like to be a migrant as she and her father travel north toward the US border.They travel mostly on the roof of a train known as The Beast, but the little girl doesn't know where they are going.