Children of Long Ago: Poems - Hardcover

Little, Lessie Jones

4.33

12 ratings by Goodreads

9781584300083: Children of Long Ago: Poems

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1584300086 ISBN 13: 9781584300083

Publisher: Lee & Low Books, 2000

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A collection of seventeen poems that detail the daily pleasures of the African American childhood during the early 1900s.

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About the Author:

Eloise Greenfield is a celebrated poet and the author of more than forty books of fiction, poetry and biography for children, including the Coretta Scott King Award winner Africa Dream, The Coretta Scott King Award Honor books Mary McLeod Bethune and Childtimes: A Three Generation Memoir, co-written with her mother. Greenfield is the recipient of the Hope S. Dean Award from the Foundation for Children's Literature, and the NCTE Award for Excellence in Poetry for Children.

Lessie Jones Little was born in North Carolina in 1906 and died in 1986. She began writing in her late sixties and continued to write for the rest of her life. She co-authored two children's books with her daughter, Eloise Greenfield, one of which, CHILDTIMES: A THREE-GENERATION MEMOIR, was named a Coretta Scott King award and Boston Globe/Horn Book Honor Book.

Jan Spivey Gilchrist was a fine artist and art educator for nearly twenty years before she entered the children's book field in 1988, with Children of Long Ago. Since then, she has illustrated more than fifty books for children, including many by Eloise Greenfield. Their book, NATHANIEL TALKING, won the Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award and an Author Honor. Gilchrist has been inducted into the International Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent and the Society of Illustrators.

From Publishers Weekly:

Gilchrist's sweeping pastel illustrations summon readers and draw them into Little's affecting, nostalgic text about children in the past, who "ate picnics under spreading trees,/ Played hopscotch on the cool dirt yards, / Picked juicy grapes from broad grapevines,/ Pulled beets and potatoes from the ground,/ Those children of long ago." These statuesque children are every shade of brown, from cinnamon in the sunlight to a lustrous cocoa that glows in the light of oil-filled lamps; a rural setting in the early 1900s is the backdrop for these transcendent and evocative images. A girl tells her grandmother, "Your eyeglasses are pretty and thin and clear / With long gold arms that hug your ears." Another girl addresses "Mr. Empty Woodbox": "How can Mama make a meal/ When there's no wood for fire?" The answer is her own hard workshe runs off to gather wood. By turns playful and wistful, both text and pictures recreate a warm mood of American domesticity that readers will linger over. All ages.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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