APALA’s Family Literacy Focus Committee, supported by Springer Nature, is pleased to award a $500 grant to each of the following libraries to host Talk Story: Sharing Stories, Sharing Culture programming. The 2023 APALA Talk Story Grant winners are:
P.S. 90 The Magnet School for Environmental Science and Community Wellness School Library, located on Coney Island in Brooklyn, New York, will invite teen and expert poets of the New York City ghazal community to present a professional development session for staff on ghazals and mushairas. At a September open house event for parents and guardians, the school library and invited Pakistani poets will engage students and their adults in brief poetic reading and writing exercises centered around ghazals and the Pakistani tradition of painting poems on trucks. In addition, they will showcase their new Pakistani-centric collection of books and will have a story nook, in which adults can tell or read stories to children in Urdu, Punjabi, English or the language of their choice. The goal of the Autumn Mushaira is to highlight a rich and enduring literary tradition of a cultural and linguistic community that figures prominently in the P.S. 90, Coney Island and South Brooklyn communities. This project echoes the Talk Story mission by affirming students’ and families’ Pakistani and Urdu-speaking identities through an interactive and engaging literary arts program designed to appeal to, educate and entertain the entire school community. Autumn Mushaira invites intergenerational conversation, storytelling and writing and offers numerous inroads for engagement with Urdu and Pakistani literary traditions.
Hopkinton Public Library, located in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, will host an all-ages Kathak Indian Dance Workshop to support and engage their growing South Asian and multigenerational communities. This year, their summer reading theme focuses on literacy through relaxation, movement, and play for the whole family. The workshop will bring in members of Hopkinton’s diverse community to learn dance from a professional dancer and storyteller who will share her dance and story traditions with their community. They will support this program with culturally informed crafts for the different ages, as well as incorporating stories into their ongoing “Diversity Reads Book Club”, allowing neighbors to share and exchange their own lived experiences. Additionally, they will follow up with book and media displays about Indian culture, cooking, and traditions, as well as crafting kits which encourage exploring Indian art traditions and techniques. Through programs that help the whole family get up and move with dance and music, supported by print materials across the library’s collection in the form of own-voice narratives, the library hopes to enable the passage of family customs related to movement, music, and storytelling through cultural literacy.
Talk Story: Sharing Stories, Sharing Culture is a family literacy program that reaches out to Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI), and American Indian and Alaskan Native (AIAN) families and their intergenerational community members. Talk Story celebrates and affirms Asian, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, and American Indian intersectionalities through books, oral traditions, art, and more to provide interactive and enriching experiences. Talk Story grant funding supports library and community organization opportunities to highlight AANHPI and AIAN stories through programs, services, and collection materials. Children and families can connect to rich cultural activities through Talk Story in their homes, libraries, and communities while challenging mainstream Anglocentric literacy practices. We welcome libraries and community organizations to develop their own Talk Story: Sharing Stories, Sharing Culture project to serve family literacy needs. The 2022-2023 APALA Family Literacy Focus Committee members are Sarah Nguyễn, Becky Leathersich, Patty Sumire McGowan, Amy Kyung-eun Breslin, Zoë Bowlus, Tina Chan, Nicole Fernandez, Tiffany Mallery, Anh Tran Ng, and Jessea Young. To learn more about Talk Story programming, follow us on Instagram @talkstory_together, Facebook @talkstorytogether, or visit our website talkstorytogether.org.