How to use this Page

The Japan Times recently published an article entitled Fate’s path led Canadian to Kamakura: Heather Willson makes her mark, keeps focused on road ahead and her Cambodia school. The school referred to in the article, Butterfly School, is a free English school in the village of Popeae, near Udong, Cambodia, established by Heather Willson with Head Teacher Sovann Phon in September 2005.

Last year we were pleased to have the Butterfly School involved with our Spirit of PaperTigers Outreach Project. Holly Thompson, author and SCBWI Tokyo regional advisor, hand delivered a 2010 Spirit of PaperTigers Book Set to the school.  The photo accompanying the Japan Times article (and reprinted here) shows Heather reading one of the 2010 Spirit of PaperTigers books, My Little Round House, to the Butterfly School students.

To read more about the Butterfly School’s involvement with our project and to read their feedback on the 2010 Spirit of PaperTigers Book Set, please click here

Head on over to the PaperTigers webite to view our new Gallery feature of Mongolian artist Bolormaa Baasansuren. Bolormaa won the Grand Prize in the 14th Noma Councours with illustrations for her beautiful picture book My Little Round House, which we selected as pasrt of our Spirit of PaperTigers Book Set 2010. We are delighted to welcome her back now as a post-script to our Mongolia theme from earlier this year. Actually, Bolormaa is currently studying in Japan, so it was good to hear that she and her husband, fellow-artist Ganbaatar Ichinnorov were safe and well following the trauma in Japan over recent weeks. All the work shown in this Gallery has been published in Japan and is not (yet?) available in Englis. Here’s a sneak preview to whet your appetite – now head on over to view the whole Gallery for yourself…

Today we hope you will join with us in celebrating the launch of our new Spirit of PaperTigers Outreach website.

On the front page you will find an interactive world map showing all the SPT participants, who are also listed alphabetically and by country. On the feedback pages, you will be now not only be able to read comments from teachers and students, but where available, you will also be able to watch slideshows and enlarge images to view children’s work. All information about the project, including our Mission Statement and annual Book Set can be found in the About Us section.

Over the next few weeks we will be adding more and more feedback from SPT participants around the world. In the meantime, as well as feedback which was already available from Agape School and Mountain View School, both in Nagaland, India, and Woodlands School in Montevideo, Uruguay, you will now find newly posted feedback from the following schools:

Monroe and Fairmount Elementary Schools in San Francisco, California, USA:

“Two books were a HUGE hit, One Hen and First Come the Zebra.

With One Hen, the kids want MORE… They want to know how much of this story is true, and what has happened since the story was written They loved the idea of the domino effect of helping each other, and related it to their own classrooms and how things work better when they all pitch in. I read this book to 3rd, 4th and 5th graders.

I believe that First Come the Zebra was a huge hit, because the kids can relate to the happenings in the books, especially the conflict between the two boys. They were full of questions and, of course, gave personal anecdotes of times when they were in those situations…”

Pingliang Road No. 3 Elementary School in Shanghai, China:

“Our favorite book was First Come the Zebra [...] They enjoyed the book very much. Their interest partly came from the pictures, the English words and expressions. In the book, there are very different ways to express the ideas from Chinese. Sometimes it has idioms to express the meaning. We don’t know much of English idiomatic expressions in our daily life.”

and Talisay Elementary School in Agusan del Norte, Philippines

“The story about <

0 Comments on Announcing new Spirit of PaperTigers Outreach area on the PaperTigers website as of 1/1/1900

Add a Comment

Established in 1978, Groundwood Books is a small children’s book publisher, associated with House of Anansi Press, that specializes in Canadian authored books (with a special interest in books by First Nations authors), bilingual books in English and Spanish, translations from around the world, and a non-fiction line aimed at young adults. Their catalog features a long list of award-winning titles that reflect individual experiences and are of universal interest.

Patricia (Patsy) Aldana, founder and publisher of Groundwood Books (and president of IBBY , the International Board on Book for Young Readers since 1997), answered our questions about My Little Round Rouse, one of the seven titles selected for inclusion in our Spirit of PaperTigers Book Set Donation Project; her commitment to publishing books by First Nations authors; the multicultural titles on their Fall list, and more.

In our series of interviews with the publishers of the books selected for our Spirit of PaperTigers project, I normally start by asking how the book in question came about as a project for the publisher. Since we already know the answer to this question in relation to My Little Round House, both from our interview with author Balormaa Baasansuren and from translator Helen Mixter’s article, My Little Round House: The Journey of a Picture Book from Mongolia to Canada, we’ll start by asking…

PT: What in particular attracted you to My Little Round House?

PA: I thought it was a really special book about people whose lives are very different from ours. I also thought it was a very unique look at a baby’s life, a life that despite being nomadic seemed wonderfully cosy and safe.

PT: The books you publish often tell the stories of people whose voices are underrepresented. What first motivated you to start on this path and how do you manage to stay true to your mission?

PA: Being a Guatemalan, I guess that seeing the world through the eyes of the marginal has always come naturally to me. There are so many books published from and for the mainstream that, for me, focusing on underrepresented authors and illustrators was one way to justify being a publisher. As a small Canadian house, this focus has also been a way for us to distinguish ourselves from the huge multi-nationals with whom we have to compete.

PT: How did the decision to stop selling rights to the American market and to start publishing your books in the US come about?

PA: As US publishing changed from the editor-driven houses that I first came to know (Margaret K McElderry, Dorothy Briley, Susan Hirschman, Phyllis Fogelman, etc.), it became harder and harder to sell rights to our books in the US. At the same time Canada began to cut funding to school libraries and as a result our domestic market really shrank. We had to publish ourselves in the US or die. And that meant we had to bring our best books to the US in order to establish our list. We had very little money, but we had the quality of our books and needed to show our whole list in order to make our way.

PT: Since 1998 Groundwood Books has been publishing stories in English and Spanish by people of Latino origin under its Libros Tigrillo imprint. What motivated the creation of this imprint, and how has this part of the business grown since then?

P

When I first read Bolormaa Baasansuren’s My Little Round House (Groundwood, 2009) to my daughter, she was captivated.  What’s not to like, after all, about the story of a baby?  But Jilu, of course, is a special baby whose first of year of life is charted through the nomadic seasonal migrations of his Mongol parents.  Jilu is born in a ger – the “little round house” of the title of the book.  The ‘ger’ is a kind of a metaphor for the world from which Jilu emerges; it is comforting and warm like the womb, and it is the one constant in his family’s life of migration.

When my daughter and I read this book together, we got a good sense of the passage of time.   And of course, one year in the life of an infant is quite amazing!  The world of their consciousness  — from being held and suckled, to their first independent movements, to their growing perception of the world outside of themselves — is all contained in this wonderful book.  By the time one year passes, little Jilu is old enough to truly enjoy the season — summer — he was born in, outside of the ger.

Baasansuren’s illustrations are lovely and rich.  My Little Round House is a picture book of the first order and this is one of the reasons why it was selected for the Spirit of PaperTigers project.   Do read the PaperTigers interview with Baasansuren.   And of course, do seek out the book itself either at your local library or bookstore!

Today we are thrilled to be announcing our Spirit of PaperTigers Project, an initiative of Pacific Rim Voices, whose aim is to promote literacy while raising awareness of our common humanity. The idea is to donate 100 book sets of 7 carefully selected multicultural books to libraries and schools in areas of need across the globe.

The following titles have been selected for inclusion in the 2010 Book Set:

Planting The Trees of Kenya: The Story of Wangari Maathai, by Claire A. Nivola. Frances Foster Books, 2008.

First Come the Zebra, by Lynne Barash. Lee & Low, 2009.
.

Little Leap Forward: A Boy in Beijing, by Guo Yue and Clare Farrow, illustrated by Helen Cann. Barefoot Books, 2008.

The Storyteller’s Candle/La velita de los cuentos, by Lucia Gonzalez, illustrated by Lulu Delacre. Children’s Book Press, 2008.

My Little Round House, by Bolormaa Baasansuren, English adaptation by Helen Mixter. Groundwood Books, 2009.

One Hen: How One Small Loan Made a Big Difference, by Katie Smith Milway, illustrated by Eugenie Fernandes. Kids Can Press, 2008.

Where The Mountain Meets The Moon, by Grace Lin. Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 2009.

Our website currently highlights all the authors and illustrators whose books have been selected, as well as other features related to the project. Please note that we will be further exploring the particular reasons for selecting each title, here, on the blog, during the month of February.

One important aspect of the Spirit of PaperTigers project is that we will be receiving feedback from the book set recipients. In the course of the coming months, as feedback comes in, we will be posting it to the blog and the site, so everyone can find out about where the books are going and who they are reaching.

To learn more about the project and enjoy the new features, visit the website. And please help us spread the word on this exciting new venture!…