To commemorate Multicultural Children's Book Day (MCBD), we're taking a look at Julie Morton's little-known book - A Wacky Wonderful West Indian Alphabet!
MCBD is an initiative in it's fourth year founded by Valerie Budayr and Mia Wenjen. The authors, activists and mothers sought to "raise awareness for the kids books that celebrate diversity" and also "get more these books into classrooms and libraries."
Each year since 2014, MCBD has included a blog tour of children's book reviews, networking opportunities, the development of diverse reading resources for teachers and a book drive. MCBD is just one of many projects to promote multicultural children's literature in response to glaring statistics about the lack of representation of people of color in children's publishing.
The most recent statistics on the US publishing industry show that only 14 per cent of children's literature published in 2014 were by or about people of color. These stats are important to the Caribbean region because of high rate of imported goods including children's books.
While looking for Caribbean resources a few years ago I came across A Wacky Wonderful West Indian Alphabet (1992, Morton Salvatori Publishers Ltd). Sadly, it's out of print and the publishing house also appears defunct. Still, it's a beautifully illustrated text with keywords for each letter that reference animals, fruit and other items we see often regionally: E for Egret, G for Grapefruit, I for Ibis, U for Umbrella, etc. The text is large, easy to read and the illustrations look like drawings that have been filled in with coloured pencil - much like a colouring book.
If you want a copy, you'd have to do some digging around in Trinidad or try Amazon (please vet the seller before purchasing). In the meantime, we're happy to share with you a special video we created to commemorate Multicultural Children's Book Day - a Read Aloud of A Wacky Wonderful West Indian Alphabet. Do Enjoy!