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Celebrating the Black Diaspora in Children’s Books

Decorative header which includes the logo of the Beautiful Blackbird Children's Book Festival.

Dr. Krista Aronson is a co-founder and the Director of the Diverse BookFinder. She is a professor of psychology and Associate Dean of Faculty at Bates College in Maine. I am a citizen of the African diaspora. My Black ancestors came to the United States involuntarily as enslaved people several generations ago. Their unrecorded history […]

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The Power of Cross Group Books — Internationally!

Illustration by Scott M. Fischer from Lottie Paris and the Best Place by Angela Johnson.

Last month I received an unexpected and delightful invitation: to meet via Zoom with the “Black Moms of Austria,” the “Black Dads of Germany,” and a number of their allies, to share the Diverse BookFinder’s research on Cross Group books. The contact had been made through Naa Anorkor (top right in the photo), an Austrian […]

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Racial Justice in Picture Books: Countering Anti-Blackness

Illustrations by Theodore Taylor III, Gordon C. James, Jennifer Zivoin, Luisa Uribe, Shane Evans, Noa Denton, and Bryan Collier

As we continue to remember, mourn, and work for change, how do we have conversations with children about racial justice? How do we interrupt the pervasiveness of anti-blackness in our nation, to protect Black and Brown children and to support all children to grow up free from this harm? These picture books by Black authors […]

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Native Hawaiian Children’s Picture Books

By Ikaika Keliʻiliki and Halie Kerns  Ikaika is a student in the MLIS program at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and a library technician at the Hawaiʻi State Library. As a person of predominantly Native Hawaiian descent, he is particularly interested in the representation of Native Hawaiian culture and people in various media, particularly […]

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The Complexity of Characters: Representing Disability

Illustration by Baljinder Kaur from Fauja Singh Keeps Going by Simran Jeet Singh Heather Haynes Smith, Ph.D. is an associate professor at Trinity University in San Antonio, TX. She teaches courses on special education, learning disabilities, and reading. She supports equity and reading initiatives through service, research, and providing professional development through community, professional, and […]

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Picture Book Portrayals of Economic Struggle in the U.S.: What do the numbers say?

This guest post is co-authored by our summer MLIS graduate student interns, Karen Wang and Sanura Williams. The topic was inspired by Bates student Alex Gilbertson ’22, from one of her final projects for our Co-founder and Director Dr. Krista Aronson’s Psychology course called “The Power of Picture Books.” Here at the Diverse BookFinder, our […]

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The Whole Book Approach Meets Critical Literacy

We’re happy to feature this guest post by author Megan Dowd Lambert. In addition to many other accomplishments (see her bio. below), Megan, in association with the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, has developed the Whole Book Approach, a process building on Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) that focuses on the picture book as […]

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Every Day Books for Every Child

“Any Child: Books featuring BIPOC in which race, ethnicity, tribal affiliation, culture, im/migration, and/or religious, sacred, or origin stories are not central to the story. These elements may be present, but they are not essential to the plot and could be changed without altering the storyline.” Over the next few months, we’ll be featuring a list […]

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A Critical Look at #OwnVoices Books

I was really eager to read this set of #OwnVoices books with the expectation that they would be ones with which I could identify. But by the time I was halfway through, the characters and their stories felt foreign to me. After a summer as the Diverse BookFinder’s student research fellow, racial and cultural representation in […]

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August Shelfie: How to Start a Community Conversation with a Book About Immigration

My favorite bookshelf is in pieces — literally. Like a child’s Tinker Toy set waiting to be assembled, the shelf’s parts lie in a bright red bin. One by one, librarians fit the scattered wooden dowels, blocks, sliders, and flats together until they form a home for 30 diverse picture books. Once those books are […]

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