Music Credit:  “NY” composed and performed by Kosta T from the cd Soul Sand, used courtesy of Free Music Archive

Jo Reed: From the National Endowment for the Arts, this is Art Works, I’m Josephine Reed

Kirsten Cappy: That's my dream,… that new arrival kids and our subsequent generations find a home in books. Because home is such a complex thing for an immigrant. Is it here? Is it there? Is it somewhere in between? And it's different for every person in the family, and I want all of us to be able to find a sense of home in the books that are in our hands.

Jo Reed: That was Kirsten Cappy, the co-founder of I'm Your Neighbor Books.  Based in Portland, Maine, I'm Your Neighbor Books is an innovative nonprofit organization aimed at fostering understanding, empathy, and a sense of belonging through children's literature. At the heart of their mission is the belief that books can serve as powerful tools for building welcoming communities where immigrants and their families feel they truly belong. Their flagship project, the Welcoming Library, is a mobile collection of picture books that travels across communities, connecting readers with stories of modern immigrant families and facilitating discussions about cultural understanding and inclusivity. Through their work, I'm Your Neighbor Books is committed to creating more inclusive communities where stories of immigration are not only told but are also celebrated.

I recently spoke to co-founder Kirsten Cappy. Here’s our conversation…

Jo Reed:  Kirsten, you're one of the co-founders of I'm Your Neighbor Books. Share the story with us about it. What inspired you and the co-founders to begin this initiative?

Kirsten Cappy: Well, I'm Your Neighbor Books is a group of immigrant leaders, authors, illustrators, educators, and librarians. And as a group of friends and as a group of colleagues, we were galvanized by the rhetoric around immigration to try and start new conversations. We sort of asked each other, how could we refocus the immigration conversation on families. On who's in America, rather than who was in a news cycle and the answer we came up with, puzzling to many, was children's books-- children's books featuring immigrant and new generation families. It seems like a very intangible link: The massive issue of immigration welcoming, how we bring people into this country, how we welcome them, set against the complete simplicity of children's books. But I think it's, for me, how we're moved by the arts, like how we're moved by fiction, by voice, by art, to feel, imagine, or act in a new way. And where art meets emotion is sort of where I'm Your Neighbor Books does our immigrant welcoming work.

Jo Reed: What's the core mission of I'm Your Neighbor Books?

Kirsten Cappy: It is to create communities where immigrants are naturally welcomed, and where immigrants in their new generations feel like they truly belong. And we do that by sharing immigration stories, because when we read, I would call myself a long-term community member; I'm a second generation immigrant from Europe. And when I read about, say, a new family from Afghanistan, or a new family from Guatemala, I am absorbing cultural knowledge. And I am immersed in story, and it's a picture book, and it's a golden age of children's picture book, the art is astonishing. When I'm immersed in that art, immersed in a family story, I'm gaining not only an emotional response to that family, but I am gaining cultural knowledge, and both of those things help me build welcoming skills. And if I'm an immigrant, if I've come, just come across the border, or if my family has been here for a generation, and I don't see myself represented many places, right? I don't see myself represented in film. I don't see myself represented in art, in popular culture, necessarily. But when I can hold a children's book that shows a piece of my community, then I feel like I belong in the space where I've encountered that book. So I'm Your Neighbor Books is working on both the welcoming and belonging side of the emotional health of America.

Jo Reed: Well, let's break down some of the programs and projects of I'm Your Neighbor Books, and the Welcoming Library is probably the project that's best known. So let's dig a little deeper into that. Tell us about that project.

Kirsten Cappy: When I started thinking about I'm Your Neighbor Books with Pious Ali, who is an immigrant from Ghana, and Anne Sibley O'Brien, who is a children's author illustrator, we were thinking about how do we start sharing the deep diversity of the immigrant community. And how do we get beyond the beautiful image of the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, and Danish and Irish girls like me coming across the sea and being processed through New York. So 26% of our kids now in schools, in K through 12 schools across the country, are immigrant born or the children of immigrants. So if we keep exploring the Ellis Island story in our classrooms, in our communities, then we are centering that story of white America. But we have so many borders now. People are coming in so many different ways, and they're coming from all over the world. And so to tell the story of immigration, we have to tell lots of different stories. So, the Welcoming Library is a project that brings together a multiracial, multicultural, multilingual even, collection of books that says this wide stretch of stories is what immigration is now. And I'll tell you about the core project, we designed the whole Welcoming Library to fit into two-- and this is super library geeky, but in most states there is interlibrary loan, vans move between library locations, and they use a standard crate. So we went out looking at these crates and we designed the whole Welcoming Library to fit within these crates. Because this is already a system in which libraries across the nation are sharing materials between themselves for free. So we measured out those crates and in one crate we figured out how many picture books would fit into that crate, and it's 30. So the program started with 30 individual stories about modern immigrant families. And in the other crate, I worked with my brilliant husband who's a woodworker, and has a childhood love of Tinkertoys, and I said, "So how could we like create a pop-up display unit that said something new is happening here?" So he made all these different little wooden pieces that come together into a pop-up display, a banner slides around the top that says, "I'm Your Neighbor" in 10 different languages, and has these two core phrases. It says, "Read to welcome," and "Read to belong.," So these two red crates come off the van, they get opened up in a school or a public library, the pieces of the book display puzzle get put together, and then those 30 books go out onto them. And in each one of these books-- and this is the part that I think is the core of the project, we are asking to both see something within ourselves, but also to step out of our experience. And if we are reading something that is outside of our culture,  I said we gain cultural knowledge, and we have these big feelings, but one of the things that we feel is hesitation. Especially if you're an adult reading a book to a child, there might be character names that you don't know how to pronounce, there might be cultural words that you don't know how to pronounce. You may be afraid that somebody will ask you a question, right? A kid will raise their hand and say, "Yeah, but what is the hijab?" And if you're from outside the Muslim faith, where do you even begin to answer that question? So the big core the Welcoming Library does collaboratively in our city, so I'm Your Neighbor Books is based in the city of Portland, Maine, which is a refugee resettlement city. I go to community members and I ask that question of them, and over time, we sort of curate this list of questions that go into the backs of all of our core books. This is an example. This is a question that I've put in the back of a book called "In My Mosque," and it's by Emma Yuksel and illustrated by Hatim Ali. Gorgeous, gorgeous, book, and the question reads, "Many Muslim women wear headscarves. They cover for many reasons, including love for their religion, community, family, and love for themselves. Those scarves go by many names and vary in style by what they believe, where they were raised, and even by what colors they like. Islam is not the only religion or culture where people cover their hair. Do you know someone that wears clothing or jewelry that is a symbol of what they love and respect? Does something you wear tell the story of where you were born or where your ancestors were born?"

Jo Reed: So that question not only opens up the different reasons one might have for wearing a hijab, but also invites you to think about what you do, perhaps without even thinking about that-- if you wear a crucifix, for example, or a wedding ring.

Kirsten Cappy: Right. Yes. Perfectly, perfectly said. Many of the questions are not only giving us some sort of cultural framework, but they're bringing them back to us, right? They're bringing back to our personal experience. And the last 10 years have been transformative for educators, for teachers, for children, and children's literature. And children's literature talks about windows, mirrors, and sliding doors, so that every book should open a window, right? You should be able to look out and see something new, and it should be a mirror where you can see yourself, and it should be a sliding glass door and people interpret that different ways. I always interpret it as, it's also a way for you to step out into the world and do something new with whatever social, emotional,  motivation you've pulled from that book. So yes, the questions are asking, where are you, right? Where are you in this story?

Jo Reed: And that also invites empathy.

Kirsten Cappy: Correct.

Jo Reed: How do you curate the books in your crate? How do you choose which books? And does it switch depending on what community you're sending them to?

Kirsten Cappy: Yeah, great question. So each collection, and we have collections touring now from 140 hubs in the U.S., and a few in Canada. So we look at local demographics. We talk to the multilingual teachers in the schools, what families are there, and we call some local cultural organizations to find out who's in the community. So we curate based on that. But there are a lot of communities that are still not represented. And to be a part of many different art forms can often take a generation or two in the U.S. before books start coming out about particular communities. Like right now in publishing, we have such rich books set in the Vietnamese community, the Khmer community, the Cambodian community, the Korean community, because those populations have been here for several years. And we've always had a really rich Chinese literature, rich Jewish literature in this country, because that community has been here since the 20s, 30s, 40s. So we are missing stories. We are missing stories, particularly set in Central Africa, set in Burundi and Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. But we do our best, yes, to curate a collection. And I'm curating based on art. I'm curating based on community. I'm curating based on how a book makes me feel, and how it makes community members feel. And we just started a project where we're working with new arrival African mothers to look directly at African picture books, because we don't have very many, and have them vet those titles. We don't have enough stories, right? We need more and more, and the amazing thing is, about this movement of immigration stories, is that when we started in 2012, there were about 30 or 40 children's books set in the modern immigrant community, so sort of 1970 forward. Now there's over 1,700 K through 12 titles. That's like a 5,000% increase, which is astonishing.

Jo Reed: Do you collaborate with authors and illustrators?

Kirsten Cappy: We do, we do. We collaborate with them on these questions. We also work alongside with them to do engagement materials. So for example, I'm sitting here with a fairly new book called “I'm an American,” by Darshana Kiani, and illustrated by Laura Freeman. So Laura Freeman illustrates sort of in the triangles and squares of a quilt pattern. So she's sort of illustrating America within a quilt. So we worked with Darshana to create this sort of paper craft that you could fold and move and on each layer, there were three different layers where kids and adults can talk about their outside identities. Like this is what I look like on the outside. Underneath those identities, this is what I believe in, and underneath those beliefs is how I operate in the world, how I act in the world to make sure those beliefs are upheld. So those are just some of the things that we do, and every year we release book awards and we spend a long time in conversations like this with authors and illustrators about new and astonishing books.and also engaging with the publishers, because I want to show the publishers that these books will be read and purchased and used so they keep publishing them.

Jo Reed: What kind of feedback have you been hearing from community members, from teachers, from librarians?

Kirsten Cappy: The teachers and librarians have said again and again that the discussion questions that we create make them much more comfortable with sharing these books. Because we can have the books, but if they're not used and shared, they don't do their magic. Community members-- I had this incredible interaction with someone that runs a direct immigrant service organization. She was working with immigrant women, I had these books about immigrant families. And I opened up this book by Mary Wagley Kopp called "Wherever I Go," which is about a family in a refugee camp in Ethiopia. And this woman, Claudette, starts turning through the pages of the book really slowly and then she looked up to me and said, "This is memory. This is everything that this country would like me to forget, that my children want to forget, that my children don't talk about." She goes, "This is a bridge for me. This is my heart." And because there's that divide, right, between the first generation that comes and the next generation, that a mother's heart can still be at home while her child's heart just charges ahead into a new culture and community and there's so much heartbreak there. And that's why we do this work.

Jo Reed: Tell me about your own background.

Kirsten Cappy: I come from a pretty amazing background. I won't go all the way back to the beginning. My parents were foster parents. I grew up in a house with 12, what we called in the 1970s "delinquent teenage girls," and I lived in this incredibly loud and rich and vibrant group of young women. I had 12 older sisters who really made my world so rich. So I grew up on their stories. And I grew up lost in books. I have an undergraduate degree in anthropology from Wheaton College in Massachusetts and the summer after college, I got a job in a bookstore so that I could spend my time reading books and studying for the GRE. I wanted to go on to study anthropology, teach anthropology, and I walked into the children's department.  I had always been fascinated by storytelling and what storytelling does to grow culture. How we remake ourselves and how we maintain our values using stories and I walked into that children's department and realized the place that we are trying to instill who we are and who we want to become, is often in children's literature, and I just became fascinated with how that work was being done on the page. And that I never went to grad school. Children's literature became my grad school. I started a book fair company to set up mini bookstores in schools to talk directly with kids and teachers about what they wanted to read and what teachers wanted to teach. And from there, out of that work grew, I'm Your Neighbor Books.

 Jo Reed: Kirsten, you began in Portland, but now you've moved across the country. You're in Iowa, Kentucky, Virginia, Vermont, all around the Northeast. Tell us about that journey of expanding My Neighbor Books to other states across the nation..

Kirsten Cappy: Yes. So it really comes down to that world of librarians again. So  in almost every state in the nation, there's a state library, and a state library system. And in almost every state, there is a children's librarian who is trying to make library services to children as strong as possible in any given state. And we are lucky enough to start this project in Maine, and our state librarian went out and told all the other state librarians all over the country about her experience with the Welcoming Library. The same happened in the school library community. The head of the School Library Association for Maine nominated us in 2020 for an official accommodation. So the queens and kings of school libraries said that we were to be commended for creating a culture of welcoming and belonging in U.S. schools. So that is how we spread from Maine to California is by the astonishing men and women that run our libraries.

Jo Reed: So suppose I'm a librarian, maybe in Maine, maybe in Vermont, maybe in Maryland, where I live. How do I get in touch with the Welcoming Library? What's the procedure for participating in the program? And then what do I get when my red crate arrives?

Kirsten Cappy: Yeah, well, what's fantastic now.  I want to say, 2017, Philip Hose won the Children's National Book Award for a book called "Claudette Colvin, Twice Toward Justice." And Phil happens to be a member of the Portland Maine community and a big fan of this organization and he, based on the royalties from that incredible book, has been supporting I'm Your Neighbor Books. And what that means is that between his donation and a donation from a local law firm, we have eight collections that can go to any classroom, community center, or library for free. So all you need to do is sign up on our site, and we will ship you that collection for a month. Often we work with people to write grants, local grants, so they can bring that collection permanently into their community, and based on feedback from schools and libraries, the Welcoming Library has actually become many things. This November, we rolled out a project called the Welcoming Library Cart Collection. And we designed this library cart made out of maple hardwood that holds 90 books. So we're now working with schools to not only put those core picture books into K-12 schools, but to put novels and especially graphic novels. And  this brand new version of book and spoken word called Wonderbooks, which are picture books and novels that embedded in the inside front cover is a play button and you hit that play button and an incredible narrator, voice actor,  reads the book to you. And we're now putting those into all of our collections, and those bring not only the voice of the author  that we have with access to any book, but it brings sort of the voice, the cadence of the community by allowing you to listen while you have an open book.

Jo Reed: And there are the discussion questions that are also in the back of every single book?

Kirsten Cappy: Every single book except the novels. The novels we help people access in different ways, but it's the picture books that have a set of discussion questions in the back.

Jo Reed: Throughout your career, and especially with I'm Your Neighbor Books, what have you learned about community building and storytelling?

Kirsten Cappy: That's such a good question, and probably my favorite in the world. I wonder if I know how to answer it? I have had it reaffirmed to me every day that story is absolutely essential to us as human beings, right? We do not have the ability to imagine new futures without enacting our imagination. And picture books, especially, are these incredibly immersive art experiences. We are surrounded by the illustrator's art. We are surrounded by the highly nuanced language that goes into a picture book. We are immersed in both visual and written and sometimes aural language in a way that completely transforms us. And I see it happen again and again. We are having better conversations with each other because we're reading broadly. 

Jo Reed: Finally, looking back at what I'm Your Neighbor Books has achieved so far, what's your vision for its future?

Kirsten Cappy: The vision is to see more and more stories emerge and be published. I want the publishing industry to see that they need to be seeking these stories. There are new publishing ventures where I see this incredible future. There are two publishers that are remaking this conversation. One is called Shout Mouse Press, and one is called Green Card Voices. And Green Card Voices is working with people from 15 to 25, and doing first person memoirs with them across language, and then producing written versions of their story. And then, get this, dual language graphic novels. Graphic novel depictions of the immigration journey, designed as flip books with their home language on one side, and English on the other side. So the book becomes this incredible multi-dimensional title that will communicate to people, even when they have just arrived here. And my biggest and newest joy, and what I can't wait to have expand, is we have been piloting in 2023, a program with Catholic Charities. Catholic Charities across the nation is one of the organizations, big organizations, that resettles refugees that come in from the UNHCR. We have been piloting, providing a bag of books to every child that is resettled. I'm going to quote, --so Yuyi Morales is a miraculous writer and artist who happens to work in children's books and she has a book called "Dreamers." And "Dreamers" is about her and her toddler son coming across the Mexican border and making their lives in this country. And it's about their discovery of the public library, and their discovery of picture books. And she has this line in "Dreamers" that is "Books became our language, books became our home." And I think, Josephine, I think that's my dream, is that not only do I figure out a way to deliver these books through resettlement organizations, but that new arrival kids and our subsequent generations find a home in books. Because home is such a complex thing for an immigrant. Is it here? Is it there? Is it somewhere in between? And it's different for every person in the family, and I want all of us to be able to find a sense of home in the books that are in our hands.

Jo Reed: And Kirsten, I think that is a great place to leave it. Thank you so much. Thank you for this wonderful work that you're doing.

Kirsten Cappy: I do this work with so many astonishing people. It's an absolute privilege.

Jo Reed: Thank you, and thank you for giving me your time.

Kirsten Cappy: Thank you.

Jo Reed: That was Kirsten Cappy—she’s the co-founder of I’m Your Neighbor books—you can keep up with them at I’m Your Neighbor books.org. we’ll have a link to the organization and to the books Kirsten discussed in our show notes.

You’ve been listening to Art Works, produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. Follow us wherever you get your podcasts and don’t forget to leave us a rating on Apple. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I’m Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.