Multicultural Children’s Book Festival
On November 3rd, the 12th annual Multicultural Children’s Book Festival was held at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, USA. Over 7,000 people attended this free event and enjoyed an afternoon filled with authors’ readings & signings (more than 400 titles were available for purchase); illustrators and celebrities’ appearances; interactive performances, and more.
The Multicultural Children’s Book Festival originally began as a collaboration between the Kennedy Center and Black Books Galore!, a children’s book service created in 1992 by three African American mothers who were frustrated by the lack of children’s books portraying African American themes. Now produced by the Kennedy Center, the festival has grown to include books and authors representing a wide array of cultures and experiences from throughout the world, including Asian and Latino in all their rich shades.
One of this year’s featured guests was award winning author Mitali Perkins, a regularly featured author and contributor to the PaperTigers website (she was the first author to participate, along with her mother, in our Community Outreach project!). We asked Mitali to share something about her experience of attending the book festival, and here is what she wrote us:
“Okay, I confess: I haven’t been doing well with the label “multicultural.”Those five syllables can make a writer feel tokenized and sidelined in the children’s book realm. But all that changed on November 3, 2007 in our nation’s capital, when I fell back in love with the word.
The taxi whisked me from Reagan Airport to the Kennedy Center. Inside the spacious, flag-lined lobby, I was greeted, taken on a tour of the Festival venue, and guided into the theater for a sound check. All the authors scheduled to sign and read were fed (stuffed, in fact) and assigned a Kennedy Fellow as an escort. My personal TLC giver accompanied me to a signing area, toting a large bottle of icy water, a good pen or two, and more snacks to sustain me. A poster featuring my face (albeit a somewhat younger version — must update my bio photo) adorned the table, along with stacks of my books waiting expectantly to be connected to readers.
It was time. A ribbon was cut with oversized shears, music began to play, and a bevy of children and parents streamed into the large room. What a relief to be here, I realized, surrounded for once by piles of books featuring non-white protagonists. But even more intriguing were the eager eyes of children taking stock of a banquet of stories about kids like them. For once, they weren’t on the margins. For once, an entire event was about telling their stories. As I watched and talked and signed and listened, I realized anew the importance of providing a “multicultural” feast of literature, and gave thanks that I’m able to contribute to the spread.
I loved meeting the talented Kennedy fellows who guided us through the day, gave my best effort as I read from Rickshaw Girl in the Center’s acoustically and aesthetically perfect theater, and in short was thoroughly spoiled by the organizers’ gracious attention. The entire event was marked by professionalism and courtesy, but best of all it helped me make peace again with an overused but still desperately needed label: confound it, people, I am a multicultural author. And proud of it, too.
Doesn’t it sound like a fabulous event?… Visit Mitali’s website and blog to find out more about her and her award winning books. To learn more about the other authors and illustrators featured at the Multicultural Children’s Festival visit the Kennedy Center website. And for a wealth of information on African American Children’s Books, check out Black Books Galore. Black Books Galore was such an immediate success when it first started that it lead to the creation of the non-profit organization Kids Cultural Books, whose goal is “to organize African American and Multicultural Children’s Book Festivals with the purpose of promoting literacy, encouraging reading, and providing communities with the rich resources of African American and other ethnic children’s literature”.
KCB’s website has information on all the festivals they host, so if there is one near you, make sure to check it out!
