Books in BOSTON GLOBEHORN BOOK HONORS series

Powerful, warm, and utterly original, this no-nonsense tall tale of Big Momma the creator is a jubilant celebration of our beautiful world - and a reminder to take good care of it."Earth," said Big Momma, "Get over here." And it did. All one big ball of mud it was, nothing much to look at. Baby liked it all right just the way it was, but Big Momma wasn’t finished yet.When Big Momma makes the world, she doesn’t mess around. With a little baby on her hip and laundry piling up, she demands light and dark, earth and sky, creepers and crawlers, and lots of folks to trade stories with on the front porch. And when the work is done, Big Momma, she is pleased all right. "That’s good," she says. "That’s real good."With down-home language and infectious rhythms, storyteller Phyllis Root spins a creation myth like no other, brilliantly illustrated by the incomparable Helen Oxenbury.

In 1955, people all over the United States knew that Emmett Louis Till was a fourteen-year-old African American boy lynched for supposedly whistling at a white woman in Mississippi. The brutality of his murder, the open-casket funeral, and the acquittal of the men tried for the crime drew wide media attention.Award-winning poet Marilyn Nelson reminds us of the boy whose fate helped spark the civil rights movement. This martyr’s wreath, woven from a little-known but sophisticated form of poetry, challenges us to speak out against modern-day injustices, to “speak what we see.”