Carole Boston Weatherford, a professor of English at Fayetteville State University in North Carolina, has been selected to receive the Randolph Caldecott Honor and the Coretta Scott King Book Award from the American Library Association. The awards recognize outstanding children’s books.
Professor Weatherford also received the Charlotte Zolotow Award for outstanding writing in a picture book from the Cooperative Children’s Book Center of the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
All of these honors were for the book Freedom in Congo Square (Little Bee Books, 2016). The nonfiction book documents slave life in New Orleans during the nineteenth century including their “time off” each Sunday in the city’s Congo Square.
Last August, Professor Weatherford won the Globe-Horn Book Award for Voice of Freedom: Fannie Lou Hamer, Spirit of the Civil Rights Movement (Candlewick Press, 2015).
Carole Boston Weatherford is a native of Baltimore, Maryland, and a graduate of American University in Washington, D.C. She holds a master’s degree in publication design from the University of Baltimore and a master of fine arts degree from the University of South Carolina.
congratulations, Carole. Children’s books are an important way to say truth. Bless you! — Tim Ladwig