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Fifty Cents and a Dream

Young Booker T. Washington

Contributors

By Jabari Asim

By Bryan Collier

Formats and Prices

Price

$18.99

Price

$23.99 CAD

This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around December 4, 2012. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.

Booker dreamed
of making friends with words,
setting free the secrets
that lived in books.

Born into slavery, young Booker T. Washington could only dream of learning to read and write. After emancipation, Booker began a five-hundred-mile journey, mostly on foot, to Hampton Institute, taking his first of many steps towards a college degree. When he arrived, he had just fifty cents in his pocket and a dream about to come true. The young slave who once waited outside of the schoolhouse would one day become a legendary educator of freedmen.

Award-winning artist Bryan Collier captures the hardship and the spirit of one of the most inspiring figures in American history, bringing to life Booker T. Washington’s journey to learn, to read, and to realize a dream.

  • A School Library Journal 2012 Editor's Choice List
    A Kirkus Best Children's Books List Selection
    A Fall 2012 Parent's Choice Silver Award Winner
    An NAACP Image Award Nominee
    A 2013 CCBC Choices list selection
  • Praise for Fifty Cents and a Dream
    *"Asim's lyrical text transforms the journey into a spiritual awakening for a young man who had 'a dream in his soul.' Collier is in brilliant Caldecott Honor style, using his signature watercolor paintings and cut-paper collage to incorporate elements from Booker's life and visions into each illustration...An outstanding achievement and a life worthy of note."
    Kirkus (starred review)
  • * "Collier's patterned and textured watercolor and paper collage paintings perfectly mirror the narrative...An inspirational life, memorably presented."
    School Library Journal (starred review)
  • * "Collier's (Dave the Potter) sophisticated design elements will have readers revisiting his extraordinary collages...Asim's (Boy of Mine) lyrical narrative is succinct yet illustrative, and, combined with the artwork, makes an impressive addition to any biography collection."
    Publishers Weekly (starred review)
  • "Booker T. Washington is often attacked for compromising with, rather than attacking, the political establishment, but in this handsome picture-book biography, the focus is on an amazing achievement in his youth, when he walked 500 miles from his West Virginia home 'without a single penny in his pocket' to make it to school."
    Booklist
  • "Everything about the bookmaking here-from the carefully chosen typography to the look of parchment paper to the endpapers taken from Webster's American Spelling Book-reverberates with the importance of books and learning."
    The Horn Book
  • "Remarkable...[a] triumph in picture book design...told with poetic and soulful candor."
    New York Times Book Review

On Sale
Dec 4, 2012
Page Count
48 pages
ISBN-13
9780316086578

Jabari Asim

About the Author

Jabari Asim is the author of several adult and children’s books, including Preaching to the Chickens which was named one of the NYT Best Illustrated Books of 2016 and Fifty Cents and a Dream-an NAACP Image Award Nominee, CCBC Choice, School Library Journal Editor’s Choice, and Kirkus Best Book. He is an associate professor at Emerson College in Boston and executive editor of The Crisis, the magazine of the NAACP. He recently was honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives in Newton, Massachusetts.

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Bryan Collier

About the Author

Bryan Collier has illustrated more than twenty-five picture books, including the award-winning Trombone Shorty, Dave the Potter, and Knock Knock: My Father’s Dream for Me, as well as City Shapes, and Fifty Cents and a Dream, and has received four Caldecott Honors and six Coretta Scott King Awards.  He lives with his wife and children in Marlboro, New York.

Learn more about this author