Today, in honor of Black History Month, the Spirit of PaperTigers (whose news has been spreading far) make way for the spirit of Coretta Scott King.

In commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the Coretta Scott King Book Awards (established in honor of Coretta Scott King’s legacy to increase the presence and appreciation of African-American writers and illustrators in the book community), last year TeachingBooks.net launched the Coretta Scott King Book Award Curriculum Resource Center, “a free, multimedia, online database for educators and families, featuring more than 250 original recordings with the award-winning authors and illustrators, and hundreds of lesson plans” (including material on Jerry Pinkney’s work—he’s the only artist to date to win the award five times).

We encourage you to explore these resources and seek out the fantastic books they highlight. Doing so would make for a wonderful way of honoring Black History Month. And since we are talking about going deeper, beyond the “festivals & heroes” surface of the occasion, here’s a little piece of trivia for you: Did you know that Coretta Scott King initially didn’t like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.? She thought he was too short. But, luckily, she knew better than to let first impressions get in the way of better judgement. Amen to that!

Bookshelf #14:

Older Brother  and Little Brother
11 years old and nearly 9 years old
Kirkbymoorside, United Kingdom

These shelves are in Little Brother’s bedroom but both boys dip into them – as do I!  There are lots of favorites there – many of which we’ve got to know through PaperTigers.  Sometimes we just grab a random handful and pile into bed for a “book session” – though as they get older, it seems to be getting harder and harder to get readaloud time together apart from bedtime.

Submitted by: Marjorie

For details on how to submit a photo of your child’s bookshelf, click here.

Hooray for Nathalie Mvondo, who writes today that her blog Multiculturalism Rocks! is now a month old – and what a month! She’s featured an interview with Stacy Whitman, founding editor of TU Publishing; the re-emerging bookcover scandal; and a sensitive and informative post about the Haiti earthquake.

If you haven’t paid Nathalie a visit yet, head on over and discover Multiculturalism Rocks! for yourself – and don’t miss out her delightful About Me page, where she talks about her first book and the trouble it got her into!

As soon as I spotted the Social Justice Challenge button dotted all over the blogosphere, I knew that I would have to come up with some very good arguments not to take it on… so you will now find said button in our side-bar and here is my first post as an Activist for this month. If you haven’t already, I really do recommend you read this post, which explains the workings of the Challenge much better than I ever could… I will just say that this is a Challenge to do, as well as to absorb…

Launching January’s theme of Religious Freedom, which happens to run parallel to our own current theme of Respect for Religious Diversity, we are asked to answer a few questions:

What is the first thing that comes to your mind when you think of religious freedom?
Peace and harmony – when we all learn to respect the right of each individual to follow (or not) the religion of their choice without fear of persecution, the human race will come close to achieving them. And education also comes to mind – because children (and adults) need to find out about the different world faiths, and learn to value both the diversity and shared values that they have at their heart.

What knowledge do you have of present threats to religious freedom in our world today?
I have some awareness of religious intolerance across the world – but I’m not going to go into it here…

Have you chosen a book or resource to read for this month?
With my sons, I’m going to read Many Windows: Six Kids, Five Faiths, One Community by Rukhsana Khan with Elisa Carbone and Uma Krishnaswami (Napoleon, 2008) and The Grand Mosque of Paris: A Story of How Muslims Rescued Jews During the Holocaust by Karen Gray Ruelle and Deborah Durland DeSaix (Holiday House, 2009), both of which I have already read… I haven’t chosen something new for myself yet… if I hadn’t recently read Wanting Mor (also by Rukhsana) , I would choose that…

Why does religious freedom matter to you?
It is a human right.

Two of the books I gave my 8-year-old daughter for Christmas were Douglas Wood‘s Old Turtle (illus. by Cheng Khee-Chee) and Old Turtle and the Broken Truth (illus. by Jon J Muth). I had heard much about these modern-day classics over the years and was looking forward to sharing them with her. I read the books once, before wrapping and putting them under our Christmas tree, but it wasn’t until we read them together, snuggled up in bed, that I realized how truly special they were. Their plea for unity, acceptance and understanding between people and nature got two thumbs up from my daughter.

In Old Turtle, when all creation starts arguing over who or what God is, Old Turtle, their wise and ancient leader, is the only one who accepts and incorporates the beliefs of all the creatures: “‘God is indeed deep,’ she says to the fish in the sea, ‘and much higher than high,’ she tells the mountains.” In Old Turtle and the Broken Truth (Muth’s image of the Truth falling from the sky and breaking in half being an especially poignant one), it’s up to a young, determined girl to help humans see that the truth they are fighting over is broken, and that there is not just one truth, but “truths all around us, and within us.”

The very important ideas these books convey add dimension to our website’s current focus on Respect for Religious Diversity, and the following quote from Old Turtle and the Broken Truth perfectly captures its essence:

Remember this, Little One… The Broken Truth, and life itself, will be mended only when one person meets another—someone from a different place or with a different face or different ways—and sees and hears herself. Only then will the people know that every person, every being, is important, and that the world was made for each of us.

A very Happy New Year to all our readers old and new – in the words of our current editorial over on the PaperTigers website, all of us on the PaperTigers team wish you a 2010 filled with books, peace and understanding!

…And in order to help you ensure that you have plenty of books to read, it’s time to launch our Reading the World Challenge for 2010. You may have noticed that this year we have a wonderful new widget (Thank you, Eun Ha!): please do use it on your blog if you have one; and if you don’t, do let us know about your book-choices – we would love to feature them here. I know there are many book-challenges out there but do join us if you can.

The criteria will be the same as last year, with one slight difference. You can choose at what point between January and June your 7-month period begins, in order to have completed the Challenge by the end of the year. So here’s what we have to do:

Choose one book from/about/by or illustrated by someone from each of the seven continents – that’s:

Africa
Antarctica
Asia
Australasia
Europe
North America
South America

Have the books read aloud to you or read them yourself; share them as part of a book-group or in class. Combine your choices with other reading challenges.

The books can be picture-books, poetry, fiction, non-fiction… the choice is yours.

You can find lots of ideas in the PaperTigers Reviews and Reading Lists sections – and if you have any ideas you’d like to suggest to people joining in from different continents, please do!

Happy Reading!

And P.S. If anyone would like the code for adding the button to their blog, please email me – marjorie(at)papertigers(dot)org – and thank you to all of you who have already taken it for getting the word out…

The last book of the year has been read (Sahwira: An African Friendship, by Carolyn Marsden) and a whole new year of reading is about to start. Oh the joys of being an avid reader!…

If, like me, you’re likely to ring in the New Year in bed, with a good book, you might want to consider Reading Into the New Year. “It hardly sounds like a challenge,” I hear you say. Well, it isn’t. It’s more like an invitation to have fun and share your passion for books with others. However, the book(s) you choose to curl up with to welcome the new year and new decade might reveal much about your aspirations and hopes—and I guarantee the fireworks in your mind’s eyes will be just as incredible as the ones outside!

Whereas I am still planning to get caught up with titles I missed from previous years, the list of 2010 releases I just started already excites me beyond words. Perhaps one or two of these titles might inspire you to start your own brand new pile of books to look forward to?

Ling and Ting by Grace Lin
A Million Shades of Grey by Cynthia Kadohata
Bamboo People by Mitali Perkins
Our Grandparents: A Global Album (A Global Fund for Children book)
Seeds of Change: Wangari’s Gift to the World by Jen Cullerton Johnson, illustrated by Sonia Lynn Sadler.

The always reliable CCBC is hard at work compiling the best of the 2009 crop: CCBC Choices 2010 will be available after March 6, 2010 (for information on how to have a copy sent to you, go to their website). And Fuse#8 has a great post on the best of the decade.

Happy New Year of Reading to all!

Whitney Stewart (The 14th Dalai Lama: Spiritual Leader of Tibet; Becoming Buddha: The Story of Siddhartha) once wrote an article for the since discontinued literary journal Five Owls, called Understanding Cultures, Fostering Peace. The piece was essentially a profile of author Suzanne Fisher Staples (Shabanu; Haveli; Under the Persimmon Tree) and of her work, which often tells the tales of the Muslim people she got to know and admire while doing research on literacy for the U.S. Agency for International Development.

In her article, Stewart has much praise for Staples’ work and its power to promote peace and understanding. She talks about how her novels show us “that the worlds of Islam and Hinduism are as diverse as the worlds of Christianity and Judaism”; how she knows and respects the worlds she uncover; how “she finds her own humanness in the humanness of her characters.”

As it turns out, Stewart’s words say a lot about the humanity of both of them and confirm the idea that in order to encourage children to embrace, not fear, the diversity that makes up our world, we must help them understand the richness and interconnectedness of our peoples and cultures. “Until we stop judging people who are different from us as inferior,” cautions Staples, as quoted in the article, “our prospects for peace look very dim. What we need are empathy and compassion—not judgment and stereotyping.” Stewart concurs: “Children look to adults for confirmation of their reaction to differences. When children see someone ‘odd,’ they ask adults why it is so. If the adult confirms the strangeness, discrimination is born in the child. However, if the adult confirms the beauty of many ways of being, of living, then the child accepts the beauty and is perhaps drawn to that which once seemed different. In her novels, Staples confirms such beauty.”

Through their writing, both authors, in fact, convey a belief in young people’s ability to understand and embrace the complex beauty of our world. And perhaps because they appeal to children’s higher sentiments, their work always meets with a response.

I hope 2010 and years to come will bring us more children’s books by courageous and compassionate writers like them.

For more on Whitney Stewart’s work, check out this blog post, Inspiration for Books on Inspiration, where she talks about her desire to help children learn “to listen to their inner wisdom.”

As we approach the end of one year and the beginning of the next, we tend to face two directions, reflecting on events past and looking forward to the future. The Roman god Janus comes to mind! In the past few months discussion about ethnic diversity in books has come to the fore, with a certain amount of scrutiny of the publishing world and what could be done to ensure that more books are made available by writers of color. If you haven’t already done so, take some time to read Laura Atkins’ paper on “white privilege in children’s publishing” from this summer’s IRSCL conference, as well as the many in-depth comments attached to it. It may have been written three months ago but these are issues that are not going to go away – yet!

Some writers have blogged about it more recently – Zetta Elliott (who also followed up on her post with an insightful interview of Laura, entitled From the Other Side: An Editor Speaks Out!) and Neesha Meminger have both contributed to what will no doubt be an on-going discussion. Uma Krishnaswami also commented on this (since withdrawn…) blogpost and these words really resonated with me:

there are some of us now who are trying to write beyond the boxes, beyond the simple classifications or the books that are *about* culture or race. In this time of economic stress it’s even more important to make sure we don’t slide back to old insularities!

I think we all need to make a New Year’s resolution that we won’t allow these issues to be conveniently side-tracked. On a recent visit to San Francisco I came away laden from several independent and second-hand bookshops with books that I have got to know through PaperTigers – but I found it very unsettling to say the least that in the large children’s section of an enormous chain bookshop I also visited, I could only find two books – two books!!! So there are not just issues of publishing to be contended with, but also marketing and distribution. And in these times of “economic stress” , we take our hats off to those publishers who are producing a consistently wonderful array of multicultural titles. We do need to keep the voices for diversity heard, written by a diversity of voices, which includes more writers of colour; and we need to ensure that readers from all backgrounds have access to a diverse range of reading material – because that is the only way that kids will be able to fit their own stitches into the vast multicultural tapestry of life.

The new issue of PaperTigers, focusing on Religious Diversity in relation to End-of-Year Celebrations, is now live.

The end of the year, when so many holy and secular days are observed and celebrated, reminds us of the importance of understanding and being respectful of how others in our communities engage with and
express their beliefs. Books play an essential role in helping children learn about differences (for instance, why some people celebrate different holidays, or the same holidays in different ways, while others don’t celebrate anything): but more than anything, books can help them realize that, while our individualities do matter, our common humanity matters even more.

We hope you will enjoy our new features, which focus on celebrating diversity while striving for a more encompassing and tolerant world for all our children, families and communities.

We will also be talking about religious diversity and end-of-year celebrations here on the blog this month, so we hope you will share your favorite books and experiences with us!