



Martin Luther King, Jr., illustrated by Bryan Collier, received a Caldecott Honor Award, a Coretta Scott King Award, the Jane Addams Book Award, and an Orbis Pictus Honor Book. Her book, Martin’s Big Words: The Life of Dr. In the 1965, she went to McComb, Mississippi to teach in a Freedom School and learned a part of American history she had not really understood before :”I met extraordinary ordinary people – Black Americans who had been deprived of their rights, who were threatened with death on a daily basis, and demonstrated a kind of courage of the great mythic heroes.” This journey transformed her consciousness and ignited her desire to write about people’s struggles against oppression – it became her dream and commitment.Īmong her numerous honors, she is the recipient of The Washington Post Children’s Book Guild Award for Lifetime Achievement for the writing of non-fiction. She graduated from Brandeis University and became a junior high school music teacher.

She studied the piano and attended the Performing Arts High School in New York City. Her father was a musical arranger and her mother a singer. Her first crossover book for young adults and adults, it was written to inspire a wider public with the stories of the heroic resisters and the defiance of countless numbers of Jews across eleven Nazi-occupied countries during World War II.īorn in New York City, she lived in a home surrounded by music. 2012) her most ambitious project to date has been a five-year journey. Juanita Johnson and Grade 4 studentsĪt (CS 21) Crispus Attucks School, Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, NYīEYOND COURAGE: The Untold Story of Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust (Candlewick Press, Sept. She has been a featured author at the National Portrait Gallery, National Book Festival, the Smithsonian Museum of American History and the White House.ĭoreen Rappaport with Ms. – A dynamic writer-teacher-storyteller in the classroom, she is a frequent speaker at state and national educational conferences, universities, libraries, historical societies, book fairs, and community centers. Kennedy, Eleanor Roosevelt, Helen Keller and the Statue of Liberty. Her books have received critical acclaim and awards for her unique ability to combine historical facts with intimate storytelling, and for finding ‘new ways to present the lives of well-known heroes‚’ like Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Doreen Rappaport is an award-winning author of children’s books known to educators, parents, children and young adult readers for forty-eight fiction and non-fiction books that celebrate multiculturalism, the retelling of folktales and myths, history, the lives of world leaders and the stories of those she calls ‘not-yet-celebrated.’
