There have been Black picture book biographies coming out for years and years and years. Often their publishers either wouldn’t or couldn’t put the marketing dollars behind them that they so clearly deserved, and so these books would sink from view and be forgotten. Today, I want to revisit some of these books, just in case someone had a hankering to rediscover them.
Some of the biographies you’ll find on today’s list are of people hitherto uncelebrated while others offer a new take on a familiar name. Here are the biographies produced for kids in 2019 that struck me as particularly choice. Bet there’s at least one on here you haven’t see before.
Radiant Child: The Story of Young Artist Jean-Michel Basquiat By Javaka Steptoe Little, Brown & Co. $17.99 ISBN: 978-0-316-21388-2 Ages 5 and up On shelves October 25th True Story: I’m working the children’s reference desk of the Children’s Room at 42nd Street of New York Public Library a couple years ago and a family walks […]
On January 19th, Claire Fallon, a Books and Culture Writer at The Huffington Post, wrote an article called 13 Honest Books About Slavery Young People Should Actually Read. The piece was a response to the news about Scholastic pulling the publication of A Birthday Cake for George Washington and got shared hither and thither and […]
We’re in the thick of the month of February now and recently I ran into an interesting problem. It being Black History Month and all I was looking to create a list of Black Experience children’s books for my librarians to pull from for displays and purchasing and such. So I trolled about online looking […]
Farmer Will Allen and the Growing Table By Jacqueline Briggs Martin Illustrated by Eric-Shabazz Larkin Readers to Eaters Books ISBN: 978-0-9836615-3-5 $17.95 Ages 4-8 On shelves September 10th It shouldn’t be this hard. You walk to a biography section of a children’s room, any children’s room, and you start searching for biographies of living people […]
Spirit Seeker: John Coltrane’s Musical Journey By Gary Golio Illustrated by Rudy Gutierrez Clarion Books (an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) $17.99 ISBN: 978-0-547-23994-1 Ages 6 and up On shelves now Is there any complicated hero with a past so full of darkness that their life cannot be recounted to children? This is the conundrum […]
Jazz Age Josephine By Jonah Winter Illustrated by Marjorie Priceman Atheneum (an imprint of Simon & Schuster) $16.99 ISBN: 978-104169-6123-9 Ages 6 and up On shelves now When we try to name the biggest and best picture book biography authors out there, two names spring immediately to mind. The first is David Adler. Mr. Adler […]
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