Warren Binford and Project Amplify, released a picture book entitled Hear My Voice/Escucha Mi Voz: The Testimonies of Children Detained at the Southern Border of the United States (2021/04/13). Warren Binford is an American attorney, writer, and academician who focuses on children’s rights. Along together with Hope Frye and Erin Albanese, she established Project Amplify, a national nonprofit organization dedicated to strengthening legal protections for child migrants.
Hear My Voice / Escucha Mi Voz, compiled by Warren Binford for Project Amplify. https://www.project-amplify.org/
During her duty to monitor the conditions of migrant children in detention, Warren Binford was interviewing dozens of children and got many heartbreaking stories about bad treatment and poor conditions of the place. She then decided to compile the stories and published them in a picture book.
Excerpted from Hear My Voice/Escucha mi voz. Foreword by Michael Garcia Bochenek; Compiled by Warren Binford; Workman Publishing. Copyright 2021. https://www.npr.org/2021/04/12/985726774/
Hear My Voice tells various stories from children detained at the border in their own words. Their stories are accompanied by interesting and powerful illustrations, created by 17 Latinx artists. One of the illustrators, for example, employs a visual metaphor, which is, the little birds in the wire cage. These little birds escape from a terrifying monster. The colorful and childlike illustrations do not reduce important topics in this book. This book also includes information, questions, action points, and simple steps to help them.
This book was published in Spanish and English, making it possible to be read by families from around the world.
An illustrated book is often considered as not adequate for introducing difficult topics, like human rights and violence, because of its comical, simple, and melodramatic characteristics. However, in my opinion, by those characteristics, the illustrated book can be a powerful tool to bring the important matter in an interesting way, such as through visual metaphor and the text-image combination that affect the viewer’s affection.
The book can be ordered on https://www.project-amplify.org/book-info
Hear My Voice
