CCBC-Net Archives
The Books of Naomi Shihab Nye
- Contemporary messages sorted: [ by date ] [ by subject ] [ by author ]
From: Megan Schliesman <Schliesman>
Date: Fri, 05 Sep 2003 15:06:45 -0500
Let's begin our discussion of Naomi Shihab Nye's work for children and young adults by looking at the international scope of much of her work.
She has created poetry anthologies purposefully gathering voices from other countries for young readers in the United States, and her own writing often takes readers to far-away places. There, they may find friction in a sense of "otherness" and comfort in human connection, whether they are reading about a young U.S. girl and her Palestinian grandmother in SItti's Secrets (Four Winds Press, 1994); or a Palestinian American teen trying to make sense of the tensions and history and passions that she finds weighting her 15th year spent in Jerusalem; or Nye's own observations of the Middle East, found in her collection of poems 19 Varieties of Gazelle (Greenwillow, 2002).
Naomi Nye's first book published for young people was This Same Sky: A Collection of Poems from Around the World (Four Winds Press, 1992). She has gone on to edit several other anthologoies with a simliar goal of brining international voices to young readers in the United States, including, The Tree Is Older Than You Are: A Bilingual Gathering of Poems and Stories from Mexico with Paintings by Mexican Artists (Simon & Schuster, 1995), The Space Between Our Footsteps: Poems and Pintings of the Middle East (Simon & Schuster, 1998), and a paperback collection of selected poems from that volume titled The Flag of Childhood: Poems of the Middle East (Aladdin, 2002).
In an interview with Bill Moyers (available online at http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript_nye.html) Naomi Nye shared the following story:
"...during the Gulf War I remember two little third grade girls saying to me-- after I read them some poems by writers in Iraq-- 'You know we never thought about there being children in Iraq before.' And I thought, 'Well those poems did their job, because now they'll think about everything a little bit differently.' They'll feel closer to that place in a different way."
It's a story that sums up much of what I find so powerful in her books--the sheer possiblity of connecting to other places and people in new and meaningful ways, of thinking of things we haven't thought of before.
What are your experiences with the works of Naomi Nye, as either a reader, or as someone using her works with chidren and teens?
Megan
Megan
Megan Schliesman, Librarian Cooperative Children's Book Center School of Education, UW-Madison 600 N. Park St., Room 4290 Madison, Wi 53706 608&2?03 schliesman at education.wisc.edu
Received on Fri 05 Sep 2003 03:06:45 PM CDT
Date: Fri, 05 Sep 2003 15:06:45 -0500
Let's begin our discussion of Naomi Shihab Nye's work for children and young adults by looking at the international scope of much of her work.
She has created poetry anthologies purposefully gathering voices from other countries for young readers in the United States, and her own writing often takes readers to far-away places. There, they may find friction in a sense of "otherness" and comfort in human connection, whether they are reading about a young U.S. girl and her Palestinian grandmother in SItti's Secrets (Four Winds Press, 1994); or a Palestinian American teen trying to make sense of the tensions and history and passions that she finds weighting her 15th year spent in Jerusalem; or Nye's own observations of the Middle East, found in her collection of poems 19 Varieties of Gazelle (Greenwillow, 2002).
Naomi Nye's first book published for young people was This Same Sky: A Collection of Poems from Around the World (Four Winds Press, 1992). She has gone on to edit several other anthologoies with a simliar goal of brining international voices to young readers in the United States, including, The Tree Is Older Than You Are: A Bilingual Gathering of Poems and Stories from Mexico with Paintings by Mexican Artists (Simon & Schuster, 1995), The Space Between Our Footsteps: Poems and Pintings of the Middle East (Simon & Schuster, 1998), and a paperback collection of selected poems from that volume titled The Flag of Childhood: Poems of the Middle East (Aladdin, 2002).
In an interview with Bill Moyers (available online at http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript_nye.html) Naomi Nye shared the following story:
"...during the Gulf War I remember two little third grade girls saying to me-- after I read them some poems by writers in Iraq-- 'You know we never thought about there being children in Iraq before.' And I thought, 'Well those poems did their job, because now they'll think about everything a little bit differently.' They'll feel closer to that place in a different way."
It's a story that sums up much of what I find so powerful in her books--the sheer possiblity of connecting to other places and people in new and meaningful ways, of thinking of things we haven't thought of before.
What are your experiences with the works of Naomi Nye, as either a reader, or as someone using her works with chidren and teens?
Megan
Megan
Megan Schliesman, Librarian Cooperative Children's Book Center School of Education, UW-Madison 600 N. Park St., Room 4290 Madison, Wi 53706 608&2?03 schliesman at education.wisc.edu
Received on Fri 05 Sep 2003 03:06:45 PM CDT
