The Reading Warehouse

2019 White Raven Selection from the International Youth Library

How can Flora complete her class assignment to make a Father's Day card when she's never met her father?

The first title in a trilogy of picture books exploring the lasting effects, big and small, of a father's incarceration on his first-grade daughter, Flora. When Flora's class has to make Father's Day cards, she bonds with a classmate who also doesn't have a father and instead makes a card for President Obama. Desperate to know her father but afraid to ask her mother about him, Flora asks strangers and imagines myriad dads, but it's not until she asks her mother if she can send her father a card that Flora begins to understand, even if she doesn't quite know it yet. Graphic novel format perfect for young readers.

Samantha Thornhill is a poet, educator, producer, and author of three children's books, including the poem in Odetta: The Queen of Folk. Her work has been published in over two-dozen literary journals and anthologies, such as The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop. A performer on stages across the United States and internationally, she holds an MFA from the University of Virginia. For ten years, Samantha lived in Brooklyn where she taught poetry to acting students at the Juilliard School. She also served as a writer-in-residence at the Bronx Academy of Letters, where she taught creative writing seminars to youth. A co-founder of Poets in Unexpected Places, which was profiled in the New York Times for their surprising pop-up poetry experiments all over New York City, Samantha also facilitates workshops for the Dialogue Arts Project, which ventures into professional settings and uses creative writing as a tool to navigate uncomfortable discussions about social identity. Samantha is a native of the twin island nation of Trinidad & Tobago. To learn more about Samantha and her works visit www.samanthaspeaks.com.Clement, Morgan: -

Morgan Clement was born in Atlanta, Georgia, and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. She always loved to draw as a child but didn't consider it to be a serious career option until high school when she attended a college preview program at the Columbus College of Art & Design in Columbus, Ohio. After graduating from high school, Morgan went on to pursue a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Animation at the Savannah College of Art & Design in Savannah, Georgia. Through SCAD she was able to expand her skills and even got the opportunity to study abroad at SCAD's Hong Kong campus, studying both painting and illustration. She works as a freelance graphic designer and illustrator and loves to work on comic books and other forms of sequential art.