When teacher and author Torrey Maldonado was in third grade, his mother brought home A Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats—the beloved book about a young Black boy exploring his city in fresh snow.
Until then, Maldonaldo—who is Black and Afro-Puerto Rican—had never seen a kid who looked like him in a book. “I thought that book was me! I thought the mother was my mom,” he says. “What made that book so precious to me is it took my neighborhood and made me see the magic in it.” https://www.nea.org/advocating-for-change/new-from-nea/why-we-need-diverse-books