Event Description
Once a month, the World Area Book Awards (Américas Award, Children’s Africana Book Award, Freeman Book Award, Middle East Book Award, & South Asia Book Award) sponsor a free 60-minute webinar on a book recognized by one of the awards and facilitate a discussion with the author on how to incorporate the book into the classroom. We encourage educators to read the books with your colleagues, students, and community, and then join us to hear more from the author.
This event was an evening with Ari Tison, author of the 2024 Américas Award-winning young adult novel, Saints of the Household. Participants had the opportunity to discuss the book with the author and consider classroom applications.
Speaker
Ari Tison is an award-winning writer and poet for children and adults, and the author of Saints of the Household. Ari’s poetry has been broadly anthologized in national curricula, and she has been published in various national magazines. She is a member of Las Musas and a founding member of Diverse Verse. Ari frequently teaches creative writing across genres through various organizations and previously taught in MFA and BFA programs at Hamline University (Minnesota). Ari received her MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Hamline. She now lives in the Twin Cities with her children. Ari belongs to the Bribri people, an Indigenous people group of contemporary Costa Rica. In Bribri, the word for story is siwa’. Siwa’ is synonymous with story, history, knowledge, and wind as our stories carry through the generations like the wind bringing history and knowledge.Ari loves being a storyteller and continuing the tradition. In practice, sometimes this means that she is working on novels, poems, learning her Indigenous language, co-translating a Bribri story, or participating in a reading.
Co-sponsorship
Cosponsored by the UC Berkeley Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and the Américas Award through the Consortium of Latin American Studies Programs.