When I was ten, my mom gave me an entire day to do anything I wanted. I chose to spend the day at the library. To me, the library was a place of refuge, of adventure, of possibility. As an adult, I lived abroad, often in countries without free public libraries. I missed libraries! Today I’m a library trustee for my county library system, working to make our public library accessible to everyone. It was a joy to write about Pura Belpré, a librarian who was working 100 years ago to make sure libraries belonged to the entire community.
I wrote...
Pura's Cuentos: How Pura Belpré Reshaped Libraries with Her Stories
When Pura Belpré moves from Puerto Rico to Harlem at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, she gets a job at the library, where she is surrounded by stories—but they’re only in English. Where is Puerto Rico on these shelves? She decides to tell children the tales of her homeland in English and in Spanish.
Lyrically written, with lively illustrations, Pura’s Cuentos captures the exuberant spirit and passion of Pura Belpré: celebrated storyteller, author, folklorist, and the first Latina librarian in New York City. A pioneer of bilingual storytimes, she welcomed countless new families to the library, formed cultural bridges in her community, and broke the rules by telling stories that weren’t printed in books—at least, not yet.
The true story of an enterprising Colombian garbage collector who has built an entire library by snatching discarded books out of dumpsters. He regularly opens his home library to the community, a meaningful service in a neighborhood far from any of the few public libraries in Bogotá. The art toggles between the mundane everyday realities of his life and the imaginative worlds that books open up to him.
A gorgeous and inspiring picture book based on the life of José Alberto Gutiérrez, a garbage collector in Bogotá, Colombia who started a library with a single discarded book found on his route.
In the city of Bogata, in the barrio of La Nueva Gloria, there live two Joses. One is a boy who dreams of Saturdays-- that's the day he gets to visit Paradise, the library. The second Jose is a garbage collector. From dusk until dawn, he scans the sidewalks as he drives, squinting in the dim light, searching household trash for hidden treasure . . . books!…
This lyrical picture book memoir celebrates libraries and the way they opened possibilities for Morales when she immigrated to the United States. The author’s note at the back gives all the details about what happened to Morales. Her distinctive art is luscious and full of tiny details to discover and savor. The book is also available in a Spanish language version, titled Soñadores. Morales’ sister, Magaly, illustrated my book.
4
authors picked
Dreamers
as one of their favorite books, and they share
why you should read it.
This book is for kids age
4,
5,
6, and
7.
What is this book about?
We are resilience. We are hope. We are dreamers.
Yuyi Morales brought her hopes, her passion, her strength, and her stories with her, when she came to the United States in 1994 with her infant son. She left behind nearly everything she owned, but she didn't come empty-handed.
Dreamers is a celebration of making your home with the things you always carry: your resilience, your dreams, your hopes and history. It's the story of finding your way in a new place, of navigating an unfamiliar world and finding the best parts of it. In dark times, it's a promise that…
In 2011, when violent protests rocked Egypt, thousands of people joined hands and formed a human chain to surround and protect the library in Alexandria. This true story is told from the perspective of the librarian who feared his library would be destroyed until the moment that book lovers joined together to save it. Beautiful illustrations by the collage artist Susan Roth.
The inspiring true story of demonstrators standing up for the love of a library, from a New York Times bestselling illustrator
In January 2011, in a moment that captured the hearts of people all over the world, thousands of Egypt's students, library workers, and demonstrators surrounded the great Library of Alexandria and joined hands, forming a human chain to protect the building. They chanted "We love you, Egypt!" as they stood together for the freedom the library represented.
Illustrated with Susan L. Roth's stunning collages, this amazing true story demonstrates how the love of books and libraries can unite a…
This book looks like a picture book, but with its large format, 48 pages, 4,519 words, and page-length poems, it is really for a middle school or older audience. It tells the fascinating story of how a passionate collector built a library to prove that African Americans have a history. Today that collection is the heart of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in the New York Public Library. The gorgeous paintings by Eric Velasquez will entrance everyone from preschooler to adult.
In luminous paintings and arresting poems, two of children’s literature’s top African-American scholars track Arturo Schomburg’s quest to correct history.
Where is our historian to give us our side? Arturo asked.
Amid the scholars, poets, authors, and artists of the Harlem Renaissance stood an Afro–Puerto Rican named Arturo Schomburg. This law clerk’s life’s passion was to collect books, letters, music, and art from Africa and the African diaspora and bring to light the achievements of people of African descent through the ages. When Schomburg’s collection became so big it began to overflow his house (and his wife threatened to mutiny),…
All those numbers on the spines of library books? This book tells the story of the man who invented the first widely-used library cataloguing system: Melvil Dewey. Sometimes biographies gloss over difficult personalities, but this one doesn’t pretend Dewey was always admirable. Instead, it suggests that his bull-headedness might have been part of the reason his decimal cataloguing system was ultimately adopted. And Fotheringham manages to make a book about books lively and fun in the illustrations.
Bank Street College of Education Best Book of the Year
Who was Melvil Dewey? Learn how Dewey's love of organization and words drove him to develop and implement his Dewey Decimal system, leaving a significant and lasting impact in libraries across the country.
When Melvil Dewey realized every library organized their books differently, he wondered if he could invent a system all libraries could use to organize them efficiently. A rat-a-tat speaker, Melvil was a persistent (and noisy) advocate for free public libraries. And while he made enemies along the way as he pushed for changes-like his battle to establish…
I'm the oldest granddaughter of Leora, who lost three sons during WWII. To learn what happened to them, I studied casualty and missing aircraft reports, missions reports, and read unit histories. I’ve corresponded with veterans who knew one of the brothers, who witnessed the bomber hit the water off New Guinea, and who accompanied one brother’s body home. I’m still in contact with the family members of two crew members on the bomber. The companion book, Leora’s Letters, is the family story of the five Wilson brothers who served, but only two came home.
The day the second atomic bomb was dropped, Clabe and Leora Wilson’s postman brought a telegram to their acreage near Perry, Iowa. One son was already in the U.S. Navy before Pearl Harbor had been attacked. Four more sons worked with their father, tenant farmers near Minburn until, one by one; all five sons were serving their country in the military–two in the Navy and three as Army Air Force pilots.
Only two sons came home.
Leora’s Letters is the compelling true account of a woman whose most tender hopes were disrupted by great losses. Yet she lived out four…
The day the second atomic bomb was dropped, Clabe and Leora Wilson’s postman brought a telegram to their acreage near Perry, Iowa. One son was already in the U.S. Navy before Pearl Harbor had been attacked. Four more sons worked with their father, tenant farmers near Minburn until, one by one, all five sons were serving their country in the military. The oldest son re-enlisted in the Navy. The younger three became U.S. Army Air Force pilots. As the family optimist, Leora wrote hundreds of letters, among all her regular chores, dispensing news and keeping up the morale of the…
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