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Jan 8, 2025 | 
astrapublishinghouse.com | Charlotte Watson Sherman |Geneva Bowers |Alice Faye Duncan |Charly Palmer
Biographies, Picture Books & Graphic Novels for Kids Ideal for Black History Month (updated 1/2025) Celebrate Black achievement, innovation, and history during Black History Month! Our collection of picture books bring alive the stories of little-known Black heroes who have fought for justice, made new scientific discoveries, created great art and music, and made this world a better place to live.
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Dec 9, 2024 | 
oxfordamerican.org | Alice Faye Duncan
Photograph courtesy Joan Williams Patterson When the Oxford American dispatched a call for stories about Memphis music, I called Verna Vaughn, my favorite local librarian. At eighty years old, bespectacled in silver harlequin frames, she lives in pursuit of good food, blues music, and an ever more meticulous understanding of Memphis history. I asked, “What Memphis artist is uncelebrated and needs a revival?”Verna served a swift directive. She said, “Write about A. C.
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Dec 8, 2024 | 
ediblememphis.com | Alice Faye Duncan
A short history of banana pudding and where we’re going to get itIn the American South, banana pudding is a shining star on the dessert table at potlucks and holiday gatherings, often featured next to other favorites like pound cake and sweet potato pie. My misguided imagination has long assumed that banana pudding—like soul food—had its beginning in the antebellum South. But I was wrong! The tropical fruit did not grow in the United States until after 1870.
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Nov 20, 2024 | 
memphisflyer.com | Alice Faye Duncan
Dear friend, I am writing to you from my native city and home, Memphis, Tennessee. It is an easy Sunday morning complete with blue skies and sunshine. The temperature is a balmy 70 degrees. Will it remain easy? Not sure. As I write, the U.S. presidential election is two days away.
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Jul 17, 2024 | 
memphisflyer.com | Alice Faye Duncan
I made a great discovery during the summer of 2015. While driving through the Mississippi Delta, a sign welcomed me to Greenwood, “Home of 5-Time Olympian, Willye B. White.” Who? I did a Google search. Willye B. White was a Black girl born with fast feet like Hermes. Running from work in cotton fields, she raced in international track competitions from 1956 to 1972. I was teaching school. There was no time to research Willye’s life.
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Jun 20, 2024 | 
hbook.com | Jack Gantos |Tanya Lee Stone |Steve Sheinkin |Alice Faye Duncan
How did I end up in the picture-book world? It was all because of Nicole Rubel, the brilliant illustrator of the Rotten Ralph books, among many others. I was a creative writing student at Emerson College, and I was still on parole after an unsuccessful attempt to smuggle a ton of hashish on a sailboat from St. Croix, in the U.S. Virgin Islands, to New York City.
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Jun 13, 2024 | 
hbook.com | Tanya Lee Stone |Steve Sheinkin |Alice Faye Duncan |Laurel Weber Snyder
A picture book is a dance that begins with a solitary dancer, whose success depends on sharing the stage with future partners. In truth, it is a company of dancers: author and illustrator, editor, designer, and art director. And only together will the dance flourish. But as Patrick Swayze famously said in Dirty Dancing, “This is my dance space. This is your dance space. I don’t go into yours; you don’t go into mine.
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Jun 12, 2024 | 
memphisflyer.com | Alice Faye Duncan
There are lessons to learn from Grandmother Opal Lee. With her silver crown of curls, she is a Black Texas Rose endowed with vision and courage at the age of 97. From 2016 to 2021, Grandmother Opal traveled countless times from her Fort Worth home to Washington, D.C. Her mission was to encourage politicians to make Juneteenth a national holiday. Grandmother Opal also led annual walks across America’s highways, collecting almost two million signatures for her Juneteenth petition.
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Jun 6, 2024 | 
hbook.com | Steve Sheinkin |Alice Faye Duncan |Laurel Weber Snyder |George O'Connor
Early on the morning of August 1, 2022, I joined a group of hikers at the gates of what was once the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, and we set off on a six-day, 140-kilometer trek across southern Poland. Within a couple of hours, it became clear that I was in for the most challenging research trip of my writing life. I’d come to this part of Europe to explore the sites in my then-upcoming nonfiction book, Impossible Escape: A True Story of Survival and Heroism in Nazi Europe.
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Apr 18, 2024 | 
publishersweekly.com | Richard Jackson |Chris Raschka |Alice Faye Duncan |Linda Park
My Book and MeNewbery Medalist Park and two-time Caldecott Medalist Raschka celebrate the ways children shower their books with love—and what they get in return—in a picture book that catalogs reading’s pleasures. In each spread, a child, painted in lush, loose, rounded strokes, describes the way volumes teach, feed, and free them.
