Nicholas Allen | February 10, 2020
Once a month in 2020, the World Area Book Awards, comprised of Américas Award, Africana Book Award, Freeman Book Award, Middle East Book Award, and the South Asia Book Award, will sponsor a 60 minute webinar on a book recognized by one of the awards.
Each webinar will feature a presentation by an award-winning author with a discussion on how to incorporate multicultural literature into the classroom. Readers are encouraged to join in on the conversations each month and ask the author your own questions live.
You can also join the conversation with our webinar hashtag #2020ReadingAcrossCultures.
Use this link to register. Webinars will take place from 7:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m. EST.
Here’s the schedule announced so far:
February 26, 2020: Africana Book Award – Africa Access
This month’s book award is sponsored by the Africana Book Award. Three time CABA winner Elizabeth Zunon will discuss her award-winning CABA books and her career. Her 2019 book, Grandpa Cacao, A Tale of Chocolate from Farm to Family combines her talents as illustrator and author. The picture book connects past and present as a girl bakes a chocolate cake with her father and learns how her grandfather harvested cacao beans in Ivory Coast, West Africa. This is a picture book appropriate for PreK – 2nd grade.
March 18 2020: Middle East Outreach Council
This webinar will explore the book, Darius the Great is Not OKAY by by Adib Khorram (Dial Books, 2018), winner of the 2019 Middle East Book Award for Youth Literature. Darius Kellner knows a lot about tea, Tolkien, and taroffing, one of many Iranian customs Adib Khorram shares with the reader of this revelatory middle school-level novel. When a family trip brings socially awkward Darius to Iran for the first time from Portland, Oregon, he discovers his first true friend and a place that begins to feel like home. The Iran of this novel is as multidimensional as the diverse characters who inhabit it. Co-sponsored by the Middle East Outreach Council and the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University. Recommended grade level 7 – 9.
April 14 2020: South Asia Book Award and South Asia National Outreach Council present Barb Rosenstock and her book The Secret Kingdom: Nek Chand, a Changing India, and a Hidden World of Art. In 1947, Nek Chand began building a Rock Garden in Chandigarh, India, using natural and discarded manmade materials, including broken glass, porcelain from chipped sinks, old bicycles and rusty pipes. Readers will learn of Chand’s marvelous creations in this picture book biography with detailed illustrations and a gatefold photograph. (Grades 2-5)
May 2020: Américas Award
Author and title TBA.
June 2020: Freeman Book Award – The National Consortium for Teaching about Asia.
Author and title TBA.