by Michelle Grace-Williams and Julia López-Robertson, University of South Carolina
One essential strategy for eliciting meaningful engagement with children’s literature featuring Blacks is simply to share the literature (Harris, 1997, p. 49).
Over the next few weeks we aim to critically discuss texts that could be used in the classroom to validate the experiences of children of the African Diaspora; Black children of African ancestry located in the United States of America, the Americas and other parts of the world.
In Jeanette Winter’s 
After looking at the 11 picturebooks in this collection I came away with the realization that these books merely covered a few regions that Muslims occupy as well as a handful of situations. These limited portrayals provide only a window of restricted representations. For instance, the necessary voices of children living in the Western countries are represented in books that come across as didactic and may turn off the audience in western countries even if the content is culturally relevant. Amira’s Totally Chocolate World and Mobin-Uddin’s 
As I work on a project evaluating the authenticity of Muslim Voices in text I have been surprised by the number of books out there that are both of quality and taste. As an educator scholar of the Muslim Voices Project, being conducted under the auspices of the Humanities Council New York, I helped suggest and select the following list – still in need of some abridgement. As I read and evaluate the list I will share my thoughts about some of them in this forum. The list along with a short descriptor is as follows: 
I’m Dr. Martínez-Roldán, Associate Professor at Teachers College, Columbia University. During March I will be inviting educators, teachers, and librarians to share their experiences using international children’s and adolescent literature in their teaching. Each week I will feature the experience of an educator and hope that the reader will feel inspired to share her/his own experiences as a reader of the featured books. In this first blog, Dr. Jo-Beth Allen from the University of Georgia tells us how she uses literature in her university writing courses.