English & many others!
4+
May Day
Languages
Welcoming
Bao Phi & Dion MBD
summary
Twins Hua and Hue are on their way to the big May Day parade in their community when they come across a Mandarin duck looking a bit lost. As they run into more of their friends, they welcome the duck and offer help to get it back to the pond.
This story’s premise is simple, but when the reader sits back to consider how the duck was welcomed and offered help it becomes a much more significant story. Bao Phi also wrote the most beautiful author’s note, and he talks about how the May Day parade in his community is an extremely significant and diverse event. Seeing the lost duck is actually a memory for him, and it becomes a metaphor for the immigration and/or refugee experience.
The reader is introduced to a huge array of languages throughout the story and there’s a guide in the back that lists which ones are used. This would be a beautiful book for May Day (of course!) but also for the beginning of the year, and students could lost all of the languages in their classroom.
This book was kindly sent by Capstone, and is a contender for the #Bookstagang_BestOf2021 list.
Bao Phi
A two-time Minnesota Grand Slam champion and a National Poetry Slam finalist, Bao Phi has appeared on HBO Presents Russell Simmons Def Poetry, featured in the live performances and taping of the blockbuster diasporic Vietnamese variety show Paris By Night 114: Tôi Là Người Việt Nam, and a poem of his appeared in the 2006 Best American Poetry anthology. His poems and essays are widely published in numerous publications including Screaming Monkeys and Spoken Word Revolution Redux. A short story of his, Revolution Shuffle, appeared in the anthology Octavia’s Brood: Stories from Social Justice Movements, AK Press, 2015, and an essay of his was included in the anthology A Good Time for the Truth, edited by Sun Yung Shin, Minnesota Historical Society Press.
He has two collections of poems, both published by Coffeehouse Press, Sông I Sing and Thousand Star Hotel, the latter of which was nominated for the Minnesota Book Award and was chosen as 2017’s best poetry book of the year by San Francisco State’s Poetry Center.
His first children’s book, A Different Pond, received six starred reviews and won multiple awards including a Caldecott Honor, an Ezra Jack Keats Honor, Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association award for best picture book, the Minnesota Book Award for picture books, and the Charlotte Zolotow Award for excellence in children’s book writing. It made several best books of the year lists, including Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, and Shelf Awareness. His second children’s book, My Footprints, was release by Capstone in 2019.
Dion MBD
Dion MBD, because Dionisius Mehaga Bangun Djayasaputra is way too long to remember, is an Indonesian illustrator/designer who lives and works between Brooklyn and Bandung. Dion received his Illustration BFA from Ringling College of Art Design in Florida where he grew his fascinations with clouds. In his down time, Dion is either cooking, listening to John Mayer, or cloud watching.