Bid On Art for The Drawing Dreams Charity

If you are interested in buying my print "Entwined" or one of the other gorgeous pieces available for the The Drawing Dreams Charity please go to: www.biddingforgood.com/drawingdreams

Bidding is from March 1st through March 21st

Drawing Dreams Charity Auction

Attend the Drawing Dreams Charity Auction March 1st
at THE NEW YORK SCHOOL OF INTERIOR DESIGN
Click the link below to reserve complimentary tickets to the auction. There are 90 very well known artist's work being auctioned off. My print "Entwined" in in the show. Nice to be in such great company!
http://www.drawingdreams.org/Auction2.html

A Stranger At Home makes the 2012 USBBY list

Great news from USBBY (United States Board on Books for Young People)! Two Annick titles have been named to the 2012 USBBY Outstanding International Books Award.

Stranger at Home  by Christy Jordan-Fenton and Margaret Pokiak-Fenton, illustrated by Liz Amini-Holmes made this prestigious list!

To see which other books were included, go to http://www.usbby.org/res/2012_USBBY_OIB_Bookmark.pdf.

Quill and Quire Review for A Stranger At Home

A Stranger at Home

by Christy Jordan-Fenton and Margaret Pokiak-Fenton; Liz Amini-Holmes

A Stranger at Home is the second instalment in Margaret Pokiak-Fenton’s poignant memoirs, written with her daughter-in-law, Christy Jordan-Fenton. The first, Fatty Legs, recalled Margaret’s miserable, two-year stay at a residential school in the Northwest Territories. In the sequel, the Inuit girl, now 10 years old, returns to her family, but the homecoming is not as she hoped. The experience at the school seems to have changed her so much that her mother at first insists she is “not my girl.”  

Margaret feels rejected and misunderstood as she struggles to recall her native language, eat the food her mother prepares, and reconcile her “outsiders’ education” with her family’s customs. Even her given name, Olemaun, sounds foreign.

Finding solace in books, Margaret gradually finds ways to reconnect with her family and surroundings. As she becomes Olemaun once again, she reclaims her place in the family, proudly wearing her mother’s parka, driving her own sled, and going on a hunt with her father. When she returns to school after a year at home, Margaret is stronger, wiser, and better equipped to deal with the assaults on her native culture and identity. 

The story presents a moving portrait of one family’s difficult reconciliation and of the deep wounds left by the residential school system. The prose, written from the perspective of 10-year-old Margaret, is simple, honest, and infused with a young girl’s mixed emotions, making the story accessible and engrossing.

Small photos in the margins, meant to illustrate aspects of the narrative, are distracting. However, Liz Amini-Holmes’s illustrations are beautifully rendered, capturing the landscape in rich, saturated colours. In combination  with Margaret’s story, they help create a textured, compelling book.

Reviewed by Cynthia O’Brien (from the November 2011 issue)

Email Promo Piece

Drawing Dreams Foundation Fundraiser

I am very proud to be selected for the Drawing Dreams Foundation's first fundraiser and art auction held at the Society of Illustrators in New York on Thursday, January 19, 2012. You will be able to buy an original painting of mine and art from illustrators from around the world in an on-line auction prior to the show. Please visit the website in December for more details athttp://www.drawingdreams.org/

Kirkus' Review of A Stranger At Home

• Kirkus' Review

A STRANGER AT HOME (reviewed on October 15, 2011)

After two years in Catholic residential school, 10-year-old Olemaun returns to Tuktoyaktuk on Canada's Arctic coast, a stranger to her friends and family, unaccustomed to the food and clothing and unable to speak or understand her native language.

Margaret Pokiak's story continues after the events of Fatty Legs(2010), which described her boarding-school experience. In this stand-alone sequel, she describes a year of reintegration into her Inuvialuit world. At first, her mother doesn't even recognize her: “Not my girl,” she says. Amini-Holmes illustrates this scene and others with full-page paintings in somber colors. The sad faces echo the child's misery. Gradually, though, with the help of her understanding father, she readjusts—even learning to drive a dog team. She contrasts her experience with that of the man the villagers call Du-bil-ak, the devil, a dark-skinned trapper no one speaks to. She has a home she can get used to again; he would always be alien. The first-person narrative is filled with details of this Inuit family’s adjustment to a new way of life in which books and reading matter as much as traditional skills. A scrapbook of photographs at the end helps readers enter this unfamiliar world, as do the occasional notes and afterword.

Olemaun’s spirit and determination shine through this moving memoir. (Memoir. 8-12)