ABOUT

In 2019, the United States detained more than 300,000 children. Stories collected by human rights advocates revealed shocking conditions at the border. Children reported hunger, cold and sickness while being forced to sleep on concrete floors without access to bathing or clean clothes for days upon weeks. Our brief was simple—make the voices of the children heard. Despite the fact that hundreds of sworn declarations from children had been filed in federal court, they might as well have been invisible to the American public. Our idea was to turn these black-and-white legal declarations into a vibrant children’s book. With artwork from 17 Latinx illustrators, including Caldecott medal winner Yuyi Morales and Pura Belpré Award winner Raúl the Third, Hear My Voice/Escucha mi voz tells the stories of real children detained at the border. Containing a foreword by Michael Garcia Bochenek of Human Rights Watch, a reader’s guide plus simple ways to help, this bilingual book (English on one side, Spanish on the other, with both languages meeting in the middle) directly benefits children in migration as 100% of royalties are donated to Project Amplify, a nonprofit dedicated to the establishment of legal protections for children in government care. The book received praise from literary critics, including coveted “starred reviews” from the industry’s two most influential publications in Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews. The book was also awarded the Flora Stieglitz Straus Award for excellence in children’s nonfiction writing and was named to several end-of-year lists including the New York Public Library’s "Best Books for Kids of 2021." Most importantly, the book was given the Gold Standard by the Junior Library Guild, which informs the purchases of more than 24,000 school and public librarians nationwide where it’s been adopted as curriculum and taught in schools, inspiring the next generation of leaders.