Authors Week helps Sunnyvale students see themselves in books

Three writers visit 10 schools during event.

Three prolific children’s and young adult authors visited all 10 schools in the Sunnyvale School District during the first week of October for the second annual Authors Week.

The district distributed more than 2,500 copies of the authors’ books so that students could read them beforehand and discuss them with authors Yuyi Morales, Jerry Craft and Joanna Ho during their school visits.

Morales is  known for her books “Dreamers,” “Just a Minute: A Trickster Tale and Counting Book,” “Little Night” and “Viva Frida.” The latter received the 2015 Pura Belpre Medal for illustration as well as a 2015 Caldecott Honor.

Craft is the New York Times bestselling author and illustrator of the graphic novels “New Kid,” winner of the John Newbery Medal for the most outstanding contribution to children’s literature in 2020, the Kirkus Prize for Young Readers’ Literature in 2019 and the Coretta Scott King Author Award for the most outstanding work by an African American writer in 2020.

Ho, a Bay Area author, has won numerous honors for children’s books like “Eyes That Kiss in the Corners” and young adult novels like “The Silence That Binds Us.” Her “Playing at the Border” recounts a performance by cellist Yo-Yo Ma at the border between Texas and Mexico in April 2019.

Authors Week is part of a district initiative to ensure that students read and have access to books that introduce them to new experiences or have their experiences reflected in the reading.

“Authors Week is about showing our students that real people can be authors, that everyone has a story to tell and that reading and writing can be linked to a real person in a real profession,” said district librarian Rachel Bross, who coordinated the event.