My friends and I spent some time last year visiting various public libraries in our city. One thing that we noted in every library were shelves filled with books in various community languages - here in Australian this is mainly Asian languages. Planting Stories celebrates this for the Latino community. Pura Belpre came to New York from Puerto Rico in 1921 and eventually she found a job at the New York public library. She noticed there were no books from her culture, so she began telling the stories from her own childhood and then writing her stories and using puppets to share her stories - spreading story seeds across the land.
Today there is a US book award named in her honour. You can see the medal on the cover of this book about her life:
The Pura Belpré Award, established in 1996, is presented to a Latino/Latina writer and illustrator whose work best portrays, affirms, and celebrates the Latino cultural experience in an outstanding work of literature for children and youth. It is co-sponsored by the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC), a division of the American Library Association (ALA), and the National Association to Promote Library and Information Services to Latinos and the Spanish-Speaking (REFORMA), an ALA affiliate.The award is named after Pura Belpré, the first Latina librarian at the New York Public Library. As a children's librarian, storyteller, and author, she enriched the lives of Puerto Rican children in the U.S.A. through her pioneering work of preserving and disseminating Puerto Rican folklore. It is now an annual award. It was a biennial award from its inaugural year in 1996 through 2008.
Here is the trailer for a documentary about Pura Belpre. I picked up this book at a recent charity book sale and it has a dust jacket and under the jacket there is a different image- I love it when this feature is included in a book design. The paperback edition of this book was released in 2023 and it is still available.
In this picture can see part of the title page - the flowers surrounding Pura are used to decorate the case under the dust jacket. You can see other pages from inside this book here.
Awards for Planting Stories:
- A Pura Belpré Author Honor Book
- An NCTE Orbis Pictus Honor Book for Outstanding Nonfiction
- A TODAY Show Best Children’s Book of 2019
- A Smithsonian Magazine Ten Best Children’s Books of 2019
- A Junior Library Guild Gold Selection
- An Indie Next List Pick
- A Bank Street College Best Spanish Language Picture Book Award Silver Medalist
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