Aida Salazar Banned Book Chicana Author Visit’s Brightworks

As part of Latin Heritage Month, Brightworks welcomed Aida Salazar on Tuesday, Sept 24th.

Brightworks students had the incredible opportunity to meet and hear from banned book author, Aida Salazar, on September 24.

In Garnet, Aida read the board books When the Water Flows & When the Moon Blooms. In Lapis, Aida shared her Caldecott Honor book, Jovita Wore Pants: The Story of a Mexican Freedom Fighter. This is a story of Aida’s ancestor, Jovita Valdovinos, and her fight for liberation.

With Quartz and Sapphire, Aida conducted a writing workshop utilizing her book A Seed in the Sun, one of the only middle-grade books based on farmworkers' struggles for fair wages and safe working conditions. Students wrote and shared poetry based on ideas of what it feels like to be silenced, how that changes once you use your voice, and how it feels to be brave.

Finally, in Upper School, Aida worked with Amethyst, Onyx, and Obsidian, on sensory writing utilizing readings from her latest book, Ultraviolet. Students got to hear the poignant story of an adolescent’s first love and all the ways this relationship made him see life in technicolor, even if only for a short while. We encourage our community and students to go out and purchase her books to learn more. 

From Penguin Random House: “Aida Salazar is an award-winning author and arts activist whose writings for adults and children explore issues of identity and social justice. She is the author of the critically acclaimed middle-grade verse novels The Moon Within and Land of the Cranes, as well as the picture book anthology In the Spirit of a Dream: 13 Stories of American Immigrants of Color. Aida is a founding member of Las Musas—a Latinx kidlit debut author collective. She lives with her family of artists in a teal house in Oakland, CA.”