Anastasia Higginbotham is a multi-award-winning novelist and illustrator who has written several groundbreaking books.
She is willing to talk about dismantling whiteness, collage-making as healing and truth-telling, living with sorrow and loss in childhood, children’s literature and social change, professional development, and teacher and parent seminars.
The subject she tries to shed light on is usually that people refrain from getting into and it turns out to be controversial.
Anastasia Higginbotham Wikipedia Bio
Anastasia Higginbotham is an author, artist, and activist who is the author of the Dottir Press-published Ordinary Terrible Things children’s book series, which includes Divorce Is the Worst, Death Is Stupid, Tell Me About Sex, Grandma, and Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness.
Not My Idea is the first and only children’s picture book to link racism to whiteness, empowering white children and families to recognize and combat white supremacy.
The unique thing about Higginbotham is that she creates her books by hand, utilizing repurposed items such as jewelry and cloth, on brown grocery bag paper. The super talented woman teaches art, activism, and how to construct meaning via collage out of whatever broken, unraveling, ragged life conditions we confront in schools and libraries.
According to her Linkedin profile, she completed her bachelor’s in the year 1993 from Vanderbilt University where she studied East Asian Studies. Coming to her work experience, she joined the National Academy Foundation in 2000 and is actively working there for the past 22 years.
In between, she was a part of the Women’s Refugee Commission as a freelancer and speechwriter for 4 months in 2016. Further, in 2017, she got into RIVER FUND and was also a visiting author and teacher at Brooklyn Friends School.
Anastasia Higginbotham’s ‘What You Don’t Know’ Book Controversy Explained
‘What You Don’t Know’ is a narrative about a liberated childhood that dives into queerness, blackness, and love’s ability to demolish whiteness.
It’s a novel about recognizing that you’ve always mattered and always will. It’s a book about what schools don’t teach you and what churches don’t say; yet, institutions are built by people, and people change.
A book that delves into living in connection with your own personal God, whatever you might name him, emptiness, and anything else we name and tie to our divinity and humility in the midst of what we don’t know.
Obviously, when spirituality and children are connected things don’t always fall into the right place. With a thousand opinions and another thousand moral grounds set for their little ones, people had problems with the dark subject it touched upon. However, on the other hand, people equally loved it calling it a pioneering piece gifted in the form of words.