The San Francisco Foundation Community Leadership Awards annually recognize organizations and individuals who have made a significant impact in Bay Area communities. This year, one of the organizations being honored is Children’s Book Press, the first independednt, non-profit publisher of bilingual, multicultural literature for children, established in 1976. PaperTigers congratulates Children’s Book Press on this wonderful and well-deserved honor!

Here is the judges’ statement about the impact CBP has had in its community—and no doubt beyond it, too:

For the past 33 years Children’s Book Press has served as a vehicle for civil rights, human rights, and social justice, with a profound impact on the children, youth, and adults who better understand their own lives and histories as a result of its bilingual, multicultural books. Children’s Book Press builds the connection between literacy and success, preserves traditions, and helps build a stronger future for our children.

For those in the Bay Area, the award ceremony will take place tomorrow, Sep 22, at the San Francisco Herbst Theater. To attend the event, you can rsvp using this page.

This past weekend, while visiting some friends in Texas, I had the pleasure of visiting the Austin Children’s Museum, whose permanent exhibits include En Mi Família/In My Family, based on artist Carmen Lomas Garza‘s work. In celebration of all families, the exhibit includes scenes and personal narratives from her books Family Pictures/Cuadros de Familia and In My Family/En Mi Familia (Children’s Book Press)—both touchstones of Latino children’s literature now—based on her memories and experiences growing up in South Texas, near the Mexican border.

The hands-on exhibit showcasing aspects of Carmen’s family life includes bedroom, kitchen, backyard and garden scenes, where children and adults can engage in assembling pretend tamales, working on a papel picado puzzles, making music, preparing a piñata for a birthday party, and more. Kids even get to sit on a special chair and make a wish under a starry sky—like Carmen herself did as child, when she wished to become an artist.

Very proud of and committed to promoting awareness of her Mexican American culture, Carmen Lomas Garza’s family-inspired work have won her all the major children’s book awards, including the Tomás Rivera, the Pura Belpré and the Américas. Entering her rich and fascinating world, whether through her books or through this lovely exhibit, we see exactly why.

Before leaving the exhibit, I made my own wish: that my daughter will grow up to be just as proud of her own heritage.

Lucía Gonzalez, the author of The Storyteller’s Candle / La velita de los cuentos illustrated by Lulu Delacre (Children’s Book Press, 2008) and our current Book of the Month, has generously given all the proceedings from the book to the Pura Belpré Award Endowment… so a good reason to get hold of it: not to mention that the book, an account of “how Pura Belpré, New York City’s first Latina librarian, brought the warmth of Puerto Rico to the island of Manhattan in a most unexpected way”, is itself a treasure…

It’s hard to believe that it’s summer here in the UK at the moment but the sunflower seed which Son Number One planted a couple of months ago is about 30cm tall and still growing – so we may eventually have a happy ball of sunshine in our garden to counteract the rain, which may also still be falling!

Keeping watch over every millimetre of growth has been a good time to read A Place Where Sunflowers Grow, this year’s winner of the Jane Addams Book Award for Best Picture Book. It is a beautiful and poignant story about one little American girl’s experience of adjusting to being interned during the Second World War because of her Japanese heritage; the character, Mari, is based on author Amy Lee-Tai’s own mother. You can hear Amy reading extracts from the book and talking about it here.

The book is published by the independent, non-profit publishing house Children’s Book Press, whose executive editor, Dana Goldberg, has just been interviewed by Just One More Book. It’s part of their Publishers’ Showcase, a special series of interviews with children’s book publishers – well worth listening to.