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a woman stands in front of a bookshelf featuring picture books about Ramadan

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Our New Shelfie Series Here at the Diverse BookFinder (DBF) we are fortunate to have a rich network of experts who work with diverse books on a daily basis—and we want to share that wealth widely! Though we do not review or recommend books in our work, our new monthly Shelfie feature asks an educator, ...continue reading "May Shelfie: Picture Books About Ramadan"

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As we find ourselves in the thick of mud season (AKA spring) here in central Maine, and the trees are finally budding after a long winter, we’re excited to share our own news of growth! This coming fall, the Diverse BookFinder (DBF) will launch a free, online Collection Analysis Tool (AKA “the CAT”) to help ...continue reading "The Most Diverse Picture Book Collections in the U.S. & How the Diverse BookFinder Can Help You Diversify Yours"

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The Diverse BookFinder collection includes 308 titles with Latinx characters at the date of this post, which we have coded in these categories. The most obvious takeaway from our statistics is that Latinx characters are overwhelmingly represented (more than 60%) in books of cultural particularity, the category we call “Beautiful Life: A Focus on Culture.” ...continue reading "Latinx Representation in Picture Books: A Focus on Illustration"

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A child needs a home, parents want a child, they are brought together and everyone lives happily ever after. This is the mainstream, dominant story of adoption. Of course the reality is far more complicated than the dominant view, with complex layers of loss, identity, family, and home to be explored, often over a lifetime. ...continue reading "Perspectives in Multicultural Picture Books About Adoption: Who’s Missing?"

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By Alice Levine Alice Levine works as a consultant in the fields of math and literacy for adult learners, and assisting parents in supporting their children’s learning. She lives in Easthampton, MA. —————- “This is our book!” said a mother in a literacy class in Guatemala City as she hugged the book to her heart. The ...continue reading "A New Excitement about Books Among Immigrant and Refugee Parents"

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The state of Black picture book biographies is strong, with new titles regularly adding to the diversity and vibrancy of portrayals of African American life. Of the 607 picture books (as of this date) in the Diverse BookFinder catalog which feature African or African American characters, nearly 1/3 are biographies. Among the 288 biographies in ...continue reading "10 Picture Book Biographies of Black Lives"
A row of racially and culturally diverse picture books displayed on top of a library bookcase including a Barack Obama biography.

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The Diverse BookFinder is housed at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. All books included in the collection are available to borrow via interlibrary loan. Depending on where you are, there are three ways to check out our books: Borrowing directly from Bates (CBBCat) Anyone with a Bates College ID or community card can borrow books directly ...continue reading "Borrowing Books from the Diverse BookFinder Collection"

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As some of you may remember, I started this year by writing a blog post about a collection development experiment I decided to undertake that was focused by this question: What if the only picture books and picture book biographies I buy for my K-3 collection only featured characters of color? It is now late-February ...continue reading "An Experiment with Inclusive Literature, Part II: One White Elementary Librarian’s Endeavor to Diversify Her Picture Book Collection"

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For the third year in a row, the Diverse BookFinder team honored the observance of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday with a family program as part of the Bates College series of events. In response to the 2019 theme, "Lifting Every Voice: Intersectionality and Activism," we focused on women activists. An initial search for Category: Biography ...continue reading "Women of Color Leading the Way: Celebrating MLK Day"

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As Asian American and Pacific Islander (API) Heritage Month 2018 winds up, the Diverse BookFinder has 291 books with Asian/Pacific Islander/Asian American characters identified in our current collection. (We are constantly adding titles, so these numbers keep changing. Also, we code by character, not title, so a number of these characters may appear in books with white ...continue reading "Representations of Asians and Asian Americans in Recent Picture Books"

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