A New York Times/New York Public Library Best Illustrated Children's Book One of NPR's Best Books of 2022 Chicago Public Library's Best of the Best Informational Books for Younger Readers of 2022 A School Library Journal Best Book of 2022 A Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books 2022 Blue Ribbon Book The Society of Illustrators' Dilys Evans Founders Award Winner 2022 Zahra Marwan is a recipient of the United Nations Minority Artist Award on Statelessness An evocative picture book debut that tells the true story of the author's immigration from Kuwait to the United States. Zahra lives in a beautiful place where the desert reaches all the way to the sea and one hundred butterflies always fill the sky. When Baba and Mama tell her that their family is no longer welcome here and they must leave, Zahra wonders if she will ever feel at home again--and what about the people she will leave behind? But when she and her family arrive in a new desert, she's surprised to find magic all around her. Home might not be as far away as she thought it would be. With spare, moving text and vivid artwork, Zahra Marwan tells the true story of her and her family's immigration from Kuwait, where they were considered stateless, to New Mexico, where together they made a new home. "Utterly original and enjoyable from start to finish." -Betsy Bird, librarian, book critic, and author of Long Road to the Circus

After thirty years of anticolonial struggle against Spain and four years of military occupation by the United States, Cuba formally became an independent republic in 1902. The nationalist coalition that fought for Cuba's freedom, a movement in which blacks and mulattoes were well represented, had envisioned an egalitarian and inclusive country--a nation for all, as Jose Marti described it. But did the Cuban republic, and later the Cuban revolution, live up to these expectations? Tracing the formation and reformulation of nationalist ideologies, government policies, and different forms of social and political mobilization in republican and postrevolutionary Cuba, Alejandro de la Fuente explores the opportunities and limitations that Afro-Cubans experienced in such areas as job access, education, and political representation. Challenging assumptions of both underlying racism and racial democracy, he contends that racism and antiracism coexisted within Cuban nationalism and, in turn, Cuban society. This coexistence has persisted to this day, despite significant efforts by the revolutionary government to improve the lot of the poor and build a nation that was truly for all.