We began Black History Month by celebrating Newbery Medalist and Coretta Scott King Author Award-winner Amina Luqman-Dawson, and close it out with a review of Zadie Smith's The Wife of Willesden, "an astonishingly clever and entertaining rendition" of "The Wife of Bath's Tale" from Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, set in a 2020 North London pub and featuring Alvita, "a free-spirited, middle-aged woman with Jamaican roots" who's on her fifth husband.
In The Creative Life, Frank Morrison discusses winning the 2023 Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award for Standing in the Need of Prayer by Carole Boston Weatherford. The Shelf Awareness review called it "a love letter to the Black community," and the "dignified text and glorious oil and spray paint illustrations" acknowledge key historic moments and figures in Black history.