Anika Aldamuy Denise

Anika Aldamuy Denise creates picture books that connect family history, Puerto Rican culture, language, and artistic achievement. Planting Stories is her lyrical biography of Pura Belpré, the storyteller, puppeteer, writer, and first Puerto Rican librarian in New York City's public library system. Published by HarperCollins in 2019 and illustrated by Paola Escobar, the book follows Belpré from Puerto Rico to New York, where she found few library stories reflecting the culture she knew. Denise shows her sharing folktales through live storytelling and puppetry, then turning those tales into books that could travel beyond a single room. Spanish words and the recurring image of planted story seeds make cultural memory part of the book's form. Planting Stories received a Pura Belpré Author Honor and an Orbis Pictus Honor for nonfiction. Escobar's warm, period-inflected art works alongside Denise's text, giving Belpré's library practice a visual life. The collaboration presents authorship, librarianship, and performance as connected ways of keeping stories available across generations.