By Veronica Martinez, Worlds of Words Educational Guide Intern
Get lost in a good book with the Worlds of Words Center’s Reading Ambassadors as they host their 3rd-annual Read-a-thon! The middle and high school reading ambassadors encourage booklovers of all ages to join them for focused reading paired with fun prompts from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Saturday, April 9 @WOWTeenAmbassadors on Instagram. There is no physical location for the Read-a-thon, so participants can join from anywhere they would like to read!
Our field lost a scholar of children’s literature, and we lost a treasured friend and colleague when Vivian Yenika-Agbaw passed away on September 20, 2021. Vivian was a professor of children’s and adolescent literature at Penn State University where she taught in both the residential and World campus programs. She grew up in Cameroon and remained connected both professionally and personally to these roots as she gathered supplies and resources for teachers in that country and wrote about West African and African Diaspora literature for young people through the critical lens of postcolonialism. She was concerned about issues of power and colonialism, not only in books from and about countries in Africa, but in other regions around the world whose literatures are seldom the focus of scholarship. Her research on representations of Africa in children’s books provided both historical and current critical analyses of trends and issues. 
