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Once a month throughout the Spring, the World Area Book Awards (Américas Award, Children’s Africana Book Award, Freeman Book Award, Middle East Book Award, and South Asia Book Award) sponsor a free 60 minute webinar on a book recognized by one of the awards to facilitate a discussion with the author on how to incorporate the book into the classroom. We encourage educators to read the books with your colleagues, students, and community, and then join us to hear more from the author. Below, we’ve shared information on this year’s schedule.
2026 Global Reads Webinar Series
A complete schedule with registration links coming soon!
January 24: Américas Award with Nadine Pinede, When the Mapou Sings
Registration Link: https://arizona.zoom.us/meeting/register/aew5X4KcQuCWdAOHtcsLpQ
February: CABA
March: MEOC
April: Freeman Book Awards/NCTAsia
June: SABA
The 2026 Américas Award Global Reads Webinar will take place on Saturday, January 24, 2026 (12:00pm EST).
K12 educators, join us for a conversation with Nadine Pinede, author of the 2025 Américas Award Honor Book, When the Mapou Sings. Participants will have the opportunity to discuss the book with the author and consider classroom applications.
Infused with magical realism, this story blends first love and political intrigue with a quest for justice and self-determination in 1930s Haiti.
Sixteen-year-old Lucille hopes to one day open a school alongside her best friend where girls just like them can learn what it means to be Haitian: to learn from the mountains and the forests around them, to carve, to sew, to draw, and to sing the songs of the Mapou, the sacred trees that dot the island nation. But when her friend vanishes without a trace, a dream—a gift from the Mapou—tells Lucille to go to her village’s section chief, the local face of law, order, and corruption, which puts her life and her family’s at risk.
Forced to flee her home, Lucille takes a servant post with a wealthy Haitian woman from society’s elite in Port-au-Prince. Despite a warning to avoid him, she falls in love with her employer’s son. But when their relationship is found out, she must leave again—this time banished to another city to work for a visiting American writer and academic conducting fieldwork in Haiti. While Lucille’s new employer studies vodou and works on the novel that will become Their Eyes Were Watching God, Lucille risks losing everything she cares about—and any chance of seeing her best friend again—as she fights to save their lives and secure her future in this novel in verse with the racing heart of a thriller.
Praise for When the Mapou Sings
Pinede has gifted us a rare glimpse into an island nation brimming with hope, resilience, and beauty. With lush verse that brings 1930s Haiti to life, a young heroine, Lucille, embarks on a journey to find her true gifts while helping shape a vital part of American literary history. When the Mapou Sings is a stunning tribute to Haitian girlhood, history, and culture and an homage to some of our greatest American icons.
—Ibi Zoboi, National Book Award Finalist and Coretta Scott King Author Award winner
When the Mapou Sings is a stunning revelation. An exquisite novel in verse, it is also a mesmerizing history lesson, a praise song, a love letter to Haiti, Lucille, Zora Neale Hurston, and the cultural and historical ties that bind Haitians and African American icons, dreamers, and creators.
—Edwidge Danticat, author of Breath, Eyes, Memory
WHEN: Saturday, January 24, 2026 at
12:00-1:00 pm Eastern
11:00 am-12:00 pm Central
10:00-11:00 am Mountain
9:00-10:00 am Pacific
WHERE: This event will take place on Zoom.
REGISTRATION: Registration is required for this event. REGISTER HERE.
For more information, please email Katrina Dillon at kedillon@arizona.edu.
Américas Award Sponsors
The awards are administered by the Consortium of Latin American Studies Programs (CLASP) and coordinated by both Tulane University’s Stone Center for Latin American Studies and the University of Arizona’s Center for Latin American Studies. Generous support is also provided by Florida International University, Michigan State University, Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, University of California, Los Angeles, UNC-Duke Consortium in Latin American and Caribbean Studies, University of Florida, University of Michigan, University of New Mexico, University of Texas at Austin, University of Utah, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and Vanderbilt University.