The Amricas Award: Honoring Latino/a Childrens and Young Adult Literature of the Americas

(Hardback)

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Description

First awarded in 1993, the Amricas Award is given in recognition of books that authentically and engagingly portray Latino/as in Latin America, the Caribbean or the United States. By combining both and linking the Americas, the award reaches beyond geographic borders, as well as multicultural-international boundaries, focusing instead upon cultural heritages within the hemisphere. The Award is unique in that selects Latino/a youth literature for classroom use and in that it focuses on the entire Western Hemisphere. Scholars from the fields of literature, education, lbrary science, and theater engage with Latino/a Critical Race Theory (LatCrit) in this ecollection of essays about the Amricas Award, the Award-winning and honored books, and the contexts in which the books are used. This collection offers essays on the history of the award, close readings of Award-winning and honored books situated in the classroom, and discussions of how best to use the books in the classroom, library and theater.

Reviews

Containing essays from a range of critical viewpoints and perspectives on Latino/a childrens and young adult literature of the Americas, The Amricas Award is...intellectually stimulating in ways that surpass the limited confines of its specialty subject matter.... By pulling together many disparate strands within this contentious field, the collection provides a timely and astute critique of the crisis of acculturation affecting American childrens literature today and its potentially devastating implications for multicultural awareness and harmony.... This volume, therefore, successfully shows the relevance of Latino/a literature not only as an important genre in its own right, but also as a lens through which to view the problems of race and culture that pervade American society, and as an example of the ways in which the childrens literature genre functions as a tool of acculturation and division.... The Amricas Award: Honoring Latino/a Childrens and Young Adult Literature of the Americas provides an inspirational range of perspectives on the difficult question of multiculturalism for children. * International Research in Childrens Literature *

Author Bio

Laretta Henderson is associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she teaches courses in childrens and young adult literature.