Passage II

Ashley Bryan: A Shining Life

Ashley Bryan, winner of numerous prizes, including the Coretta Scott King Book Award, has created more than thirty books for children. Born in New York City in 1923, this now-retired art professor began his career drawing on the walls, floors, and even the bedsheets in his parents' house.

Some of Bryan’s most celebrated books retell folktales from around the world Japan, India, Nigeria, and Zambia are only some of the countries who’s stories make it into his pages. For instance, Beautiful Blackbird relates a Zambian folktale that explains how birds of various colors pleaded with the blackbird to grace them with distinguishing markings, such as stripes on their tails or rings around their necks. Amazing, right? In The Story of Lightning and Thunder, Bryan, an award winner, shares a Nigerian legend about a mother sheep and her only son. The two are ultimately banished by the king to live in the sky after the son’s youthful pranks were to end in disaster for the villagers.

[1] Ashley Bryan’s ABC of African American Poetry honors twenty-five poems and one spiritual, “the root of Black song and poetry,” Bryan writes in the introduction. [2] Each page spotlights one poem and one letter of the alphabet. [3] The work—celebrating poets Lucille Clifton, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and others, invites readers to be enriched by their own heritage or that of another group, as the case may be. [4] Though his books delve at times into somber subject matter— be it slavery, the loss of a harvest, or a misunderstanding between friends—each one emerges as an affirmation of life. [5] That perspective is perhaps most explicitly in evidence to be perceived in his 2007 work the name of it is Let it Shine; Three Favorite Spirituals. [6] Here, in forty pages flooded with color, Bryan leaves traces of tragedy. [7] However, the overwhelming messages in the text and the images are to embrace life, to honor oneself and others, and freely giving to a larger world. [8] The “retired” Bryan continues to do just that. “Each time l finish something,” says the artist, “I can’t wait to start again and do something even better.” (29)