Who Will I Be, Lord? (Picture Book) - Hardcover

Vaunda Micheaux Nelson wears multiple hats in the world of children’s books as an author and a youth services librarian at a public library in New Mexico. Her books have received numerous awards starting with her first book, Always Gramma, a CCBC Notable Children’s Trade Book in the Field of Social Studies. She lives in Rio Rancho, New Mexico.

Sean Qualls has created evocative, powerful art for magazines, newspapers, advertisements, and children’s books, including Dizzy, Powerful Words, Phillis’s Big Test, and Before John Was a Jazz Giant. He lives with his wife and their two children in Brooklyn, New York.

PreSchool-Grade 2—A contemplation of the future through the lens of a family's past. An African-American girl looking to the future has a broad range of relatives to emulate—a banjo-playing mailman, a housewife who broke the color barrier, a pool shark, and a burger-flipping aspiring jazzman. Nelson's rhythmic and colloquial first-person narrative introduces the characters not only in terms of the jobs they hold, but also the kind of people they are; her Great-Grandpap believes, "Nothin's more important than family." For the jazzman, "what matters is the trying." Qualls's mixed-media illustrations combine muted and bright elements and feature full-spread renditions of each relative at home or work, followed by a page showing surreal floating heads of the girl and the featured role model as she repeats the title's query. Nelson shows respect for all the ways people live and work.—Lisa Egly Lehmuller, St. Patrick's Catholic School, Charlotte, NC END