Nappy Hair won the Marion Vannett Ridgeway Honor award and Parenting Magazine’s 1997 Reading Magic Award. In 2011, Be’chol Lashon, an organization devoted to raising awareness about the ethnic, racial, and cultural diversity of the Jewish people, granted Herron a lifetime achievement award for her dedication to children’s literature that explores the diversity of Jewish life, especially Black Jews. Much of her work traces patterns of shared trauma and convergence between Blackness and Jewishness, from the late fifteenth-century Jewish expulsions from Spain and Portugal, to the Atlantic slave trade, to the Holocaust and contemporary racism and antisemitism. Raised in the Christian faith but with Jewish ancestry and having been interested in the Hebrew Bible, Jews, and Jewishness ever since she was a child, Herron converted to Judaism and held her Bat Mitzvah at the Harvard Hillel in 1996. Now retired from her academic career, Herron works with Epicentering the National Mall Coalition in Washington, D.C. She has published many other books, but Nappy Hair remains the best known. Holyoke, California State University, Chico, and William and Mary. in Comparative Literature from the University of Pennsylvania in 1985 and taught at Harvard, Mt. Carolivia Herron was born on July 22, 1947, to Oscar Smith Herron and Georgia Carol Johnson, and grew up in Washington, D.C.
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