Heading toward Summer with Award Winning Treasures

​“We’ll go to the market first thing in the morning and let the ingredients speak to us,” Nanabarima continued… “Every ingredient has a story, but you have to know how to listen.”
 
The ingredients of jollof rice speak to young Kofi in Sankofa: A Culinary Story of Resilience and Belonging,  a Children’s Africana Book Award (CABA) Honor Picture Book for 2024.  Author Eric Adjepong is a first generation Ghanaian American who was also a finalist on Bravo’s Top Chef. Lala Watkins is the illustrator. Adjepong even includes his recipe for jollof rice so you can have a classroom or family potluck, just like Kofi.
 
CABA’s Best Picture Book for 2024 is Egyptian Lullaby, by Zeena Pliska, a kindergarten teacher who recalls the sounds outside her father’s apartment in Cairo: Auntie Fatma creates a lullaby out of those special Cairo sounds.

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Additional CABA Honor Picture Books include

•  The Taste of Home, by Aminata Jalloh, illustrated by Pervin Özcan. This time the taste of Sierra Leone is thiakry, a popular snack made of couscous, yogurt, milk and sugar.
• Flipflopi: How a Boat Made from Flip-Flops Is Helping to Save the Ocean, by Linda Ravin Lodding and Dipesh Pabari, illustrated by Michael Machira Mwangi, is the true story of a Kenyan dhow boat. Dipseh Pabari is a waste plastic innovator and one of the founders of the Flipflopi Project.  Linda Lodding calls herself “a cupcake eating, photo-happy, globe-trotting, award-winning children's book author” and Michael Mwangi is a digital artist living in Kenya.  

 

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CABA also named two best chapter books and one honor book:

• Nearer My Freedom: The Interesting life of Olaudah Equiano by Himself  by Monida Edinger and Lesley Younge. Olaudah, according to his autobiography, was kidnapped from his village in West Africa not long after he was born in 1745. He was enslaved but paid for his freedom and became the first best-selling author of African descent in the West.
• All That it Ever Meant by Blessing Musairi is an “inventive, exquisitely written story of family, love, and loss,” says the starred review in Kirkus Reviews. Blessing Musariri lives in Harare, Zimbabwe.

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• Honor book Flying Up the Mountain by Elizabeth-Irene Baitie is the story of Ato and his friends,  a sequel to last year’s CABA award winner, Crossing the Stream. The four teens compete in missions that teach preservation of nature through photography, rafting through dark caves and hiking up mountains.

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​In honor of Arab American Heritage Month in April,
​also explore the Arab American Book Awards from the Arab American National Museum and the Middle East Outreach Council Book Awards (MEOC).

• Young Adult - Ida in the Middle by Nora Lester Murad, ​in which a Palestinian-American girl eats a magic olive that takes her to the life she might have had in her parents’ village near Jerusalem. Ida in the Middle also won this year’s Youth Literature Award from the Middle East Outreach Council.

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• Children’s Literature – Arab, Arab All Year Long by librarian Cathy Camper, illustrated by Sawsan Chalabi. “A generous and helpful introduction to the richness and variety of what it means to be Arab,” says School Library Journal.​

• MEOC Picture Book Award – Mama Shamsi at the Bazaar by Mojdeh Hassani and Samira Iravani, illustrated by Maya Fidawi. A mother-daughter writing duo shares the story of Grandma and anxious little Samira in a busy market in Iran.

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• MEOC Nonfiction – From Here by Luma Mufleh. In her coming-of-age memoir, Luma Mufleh writes of her tumultuous journey to reconcile her identity as a gay Muslim woman and a proud Arab-turned-American refugee.

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Let any of these titles be a forever-charged magic carpet,
whisking you to new tastes and cultures, new friends and adventures.
​No batteries required!