By Rebecca Ballenger, Associate Director, Worlds of Words Center
A thousand stories await discovery on every page of a wimmelbook: Where is the girl with the balloon going? And the dog with the bone? Why are those two boys wrestling? In 1968, Ali Mitgutsch created his first wimmelbook in Germany, Rundherum in meiner Stadt (All Around My Town), and since then these picturebooks have become a regular presence in many children’s libraries. For a limited time, Arizonans can take in The Whole World on One Page: International Wimmelbooks at the Worlds of Words Center of Global Literacies and Literatures (WOW) in the UArizona College of Education.
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. 
