Uncommon Minds
Host Shelly Henriquez-Neill introduces you to ordinary people you may never have heard about leading from where they are and making extraordinary impact in their lives and work. This podcast is for everyone; people who think they know, think they can, aren’t sure if they could or need to be reminded that they are seen and heard. Join Uncommon Minds as we spotlight real world influencers.
Uncommon Minds
Equal Means Equal: Stories of Love, Language, and Standing Up
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Welcome to season two of Uncommon Minds, where host Shelly Henriquez-Neill as she introduces you to some of the most extraordinary people you may never have heard about leading from where they are and making real impact in the worlds where they live and work. . Today, Shelly sits down with Dr. Michael Genhart, a clinical psychologist, queer Latino man, and children’s book author whose work focuses on fairness, identity, and telling children difficult truths with honesty and compassion.
Dr. Genhart grew up in Southern California as one of seven children in a multicultural Mexican American and Swiss American family. Public school teachers and librarians sparked his lifelong love of books and storytelling. As a child, he wrote letters to authors and illustrators he admired, a passion that eventually came full circle when he became an author himself and began receiving letters from young readers. He was the first in his family to attend college, later earning a doctorate in clinical and community psychology. He met his husband John during grad school, and the couple has now been together for nearly forty years; they later adopted a daughter at a time when adoption by openly gay men was rare and often illegal.
His love of reading picture books with his daughter inspired him to begin writing children’s books after she left for college. Dr. Genhart emphasizes that his work is shaped by his identities as a psychologist, gay father, and member of a multicultural family, with a recurring focus on injustice, fairness, and helping children see themselves and others reflected in stories. his picture book biography Edie for Equality, which tells the story of Edie Windsor and her successful challenge to the Defense of Marriage Act, highlighting her role in advancing marriage equality and preserving an important chapter of queer history for young readers. In another of his books, Spanish Is the Language of My Family, which draws on stories from his mother’s childhood and continues his exploration of identity, belonging, and social justice. Dr. Genhart argues that silence can unintentionally reinforce injustice, while stories can give children language, confidence, and examples of people who stood up for what was right.
Dr. Genhart rejects being limited to a single label, instead drawing on the intersections of his identities as a queer, Latino author and psychologist. He shares details about his upcoming book Mariposa, which reclaims a derogatory Spanish term for queer people by telling the story of a loving grandmother who helps her grandson embrace himself despite prejudice, highlighting the powerful role that supportive adults play in a child’s development. Throughout the interview, a recurring theme is the importance of safety, belonging, and having trusted people who help children navigate difficult experiences. Dr. Genhart argues that both therapy and children’s literature create spaces for exploration and conversation, not by changing minds directly, but by helping people discover new perspectives for themselves through empathy, reflection, and dialogue.
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Welcome to Uncommon Minds, where we sit down with truly amazing innovators and unique practitioners across common fields who think outside the box and carve their own paths to success. I'm your host, Shelly Henrique Sneal. Let's lean into another great episode right now. Hi, everybody. We are so excited to have you joining us for our second season. And we are just as thrilled to have an amazing guest with us to kick off the season. Let me sort of paint the background for you here. Two books, two true stories, one person who truly believes and deeply believes that children can handle the truth. Yeah, because they can, as long as someone tells it with love, right? That's the thing. Today's guest is Dr. Michael Genhardt. He is a clinical psychologist with 25 years in private practice. He's a queer man, he's a Latino man, and he's a children's book author whose work keeps circling back to the same idea. Fairness matters. Identity matters. The stories we tell children about both of those things will shape everything. It'll shape everything. We're going to hear from Michael and we're going to have him read from two of his books today. I'm so excited about this. One of his books is about a woman who sued the United States government in one. The other is about a boy, a spelling bee, and the language his grandmother wasn't allowed to speak. This is on common minds. Let's get into it. Michael, welcome. I am so glad you're here. Thanks for joining us.
SPEAKER_02Jelly, thank you so much for having me. And thank you for that lovely introduction. I love the different points that you made. I would have made the saying. So I appreciate your attention to detail.
SPEAKER_01Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you.
SPEAKER_0235 years in practice, by the way.
SPEAKER_01Did you say 35?
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Oh. Oh my goodness gracious. I want to give folks the quick picture, and then I want you to fill in the parts of your bio that I leave out. So you are a licensed clinical psychologist in private in private practice in the Bay Area. 35 years you've worked with children, you've worked with adolescents, adults, couples, families, and you've had a real specialty in LGBTQ individuals and families. Alongside all of that, you have become an award-winning children's book author. And you are really growing a catalog that spans LGBTQ identity, Latino heritage, bullying, othering, mental health, and biography, right? So we're talking about two of your books today. We'll get into the titles when we get there. But first, I want our listeners to know about you, the person who was little Michael Ginhart. Where did you come from and how did you get here?
SPEAKER_02Well, I was born in Southern California, in actually Oxnard, California. And I grew up in a neighboring town called Camarillo, lesser-known town. And I'm one of seven children. I have two older brothers, an older sister, a twin sister, and two younger sisters. My parents were very young when they got married. My mother is Mexican American. My father is Swiss American. So a very curious combination of cultures, which made life growing up in that household very interesting, actually. Base some of my books on that culture in the household and what it means to or what it meant to grow up in two different cultures. I love books as a kid, not because there were books in our house. My folks couldn't with seven kids, they could not afford books. And while education was important, they were busy raising uh seven children. And I was fortunate to be introduced to books by really good teachers and librarians in the public school where I was a student. So I just fell in love with stories and storytelling. The story Ferdinand was one of my favorite picture books. Yes. And of course, books like Charlotte's Webb and Stuart Little. I was so fascinated by books and their illustrations that as a child I used to write to the authors and the illustrators. Yeah, a lot.
SPEAKER_01Just, hey, I like your I was gonna say, what were your letters? It's just praise. Thank you so much.
SPEAKER_02And I remember that a number of them would write back back in the day. And not that long ago, I was clearing out the attic and I found those letters.
SPEAKER_01Wow. Oh my goodness, Michael.
SPEAKER_02That's sort of thinking about there's a book in there somewhere, that kid who fell in love with books who becomes who wrote to authors, who becomes an author, and now I receive letters.
SPEAKER_01Oh, I love this. I love this. Oh my goodness.
SPEAKER_02So I then just became, again, a student of storytelling. Went through high school and was the only kid in my family who went to college. And so I left home, went UC San Diego. You know, the mindset, especially then, was you could just get a job and start working. But something else was brewing for me, and that was being this queer kid. I knew I had to leave to be me, spread my wings and find community and so forth. So going to college was that was a psych major. I just loved the freedom of college and being able to be immersed in academics and, you know, the freedom of being a young person. And then I went to grad school right after the University of Maryland, College Park. And that was even more liberating, right? I got to find even more community and immerse myself more in, I majored in or got my doctorate in clinical psychology and community psychology, which is a cool combination. Now, it was also these years, of course, a very challenging time because it was during that period that HIV and AIDS was happening. And so it was a freaky time as a young gay man coming out where peers and older guys were dying of this strange illness early on. We didn't know what it was or how you got it early on. So it was a very frightening time. At the same time, it was exciting as a young person. So walking that tight room between those two. I met John, my husband, while I was in grad school, and this year we're celebrating our 40th anniversary.
SPEAKER_03Wow. It is.
SPEAKER_02So it's so it's a thing. 40 years. My goodness.
SPEAKER_01Congratulations. Oh my goodness.
SPEAKER_02But as we were talking before about the decade, well, I go, how did four decades come and go? Along the way, we were together like nine years, we decided to have a family, and we adopted Gabby at birth. It was super unusual for two openly gay men to adopt. In fact, in I think about two-thirds of the country at that time, it was illegal, right? In most states to adopt for two gay men to adopt.
SPEAKER_03So we're about to be gay grandpas. That's amazing.
SPEAKER_02One of our favorite things to do as a family was to read picture books to Gabby. And so while I had my first intro to picture books as a kid myself, I really appreciated them more as a grownup reading them to Gabby.
SPEAKER_03Absolutely.
SPEAKER_02Loved that time together. And when she started applying for college, I thought, what am I going to do with this other time when she's off to college out in the started thinking about maybe I would think about writing picture books. Because part of the impetus for me there was I knew I was going to miss her. Yes. And it brought me back to those years of reading to her. So every time I thought about maybe I'll I'll write, it was really mostly about entering that, re-entering that world.
SPEAKER_00Sure.
SPEAKER_02And how much fun that was. Not realizing it's really hard to write a picture book. It's deceptively simple because, oh, come on, they're just books for children. I mean, that sentence is wrong for so many reasons, right? Because it dishonors children, super smart readers. And what you were saying before about truth telling to kids in picture books, which I frankly think is super important. And I tend to lean towards social justice in my storytelling. But to write a book, you have about 500 words, more if it's a biography with a beginning, middle, and an end, and a story that's both honest and not boring. It has to be somewhat entertaining because you're writing kids. And if there's a message, it can't be message heavy because kids will tune out. It's a dance unto itself. I wrote a lot of really bad stories, which is okay. Then I just became, because I was already a good student, I became a student of the craft.
SPEAKER_01Thank you for sharing this. It's a phenomenal sort of capture of your life. You've woven in your career trajectory, your learning and experiences along the way and what you've learned. And I love that's a constant theme, right? Along the way, I'm constantly learning and growing and evolving. And then this deeply personal experience that's happening that's actually not the background, right? They're all sort of sharing the same stage as you've gotten to this place, and it's a place of giving back. I would definitely think that your books, because of their content, they really start with a question. They start with a question. What were some of the questions you were asking as you were growing up?
SPEAKER_02I think a, first of all, as a writer, I think this is true of most writers, whether they're conscious of it or not, you draw from different your different identities. Plural. So for me, as I mentioned, I started writing books with a psychology angle. So drawing from my identity as a psychologist. And then the few books that followed were as a gay man and as a gay dad. Recall, I didn't start writing books until Gabby was much older, because I wouldn't have had time as a father working full-time in my practice. And then drawing from my identity growing up in a multicultural family, right? And so to your question about what questions I had, I think a theme that runs through everything is I was always interested in stories and storytelling. Books, of course, are about storytelling. So I think a question embedded in storytelling is how did that happen? Or how do people work? What feelings are evoked when blah, blah happens? And I was just, I was curious about humanity and what makes people tick, what makes us do the things or not do the things that we we do. And so all of that contributed to me thinking more and more about injustice and unfairness and wanting to explore that. I just wanted to share those stories with kids because kids are experts at picking out unfairness. You hear that on the playground within seconds. You can't do that. That's unfair. Yeah. So they know it. And so picking up on that theme and telling bigger stories with more gravity, right? Those are the stories that I gravitate. These are the ones I'm gonna share today. But there are three more coming out. They're similar in nature, and then some.
SPEAKER_01Ooh, I can't wait. Oh my goodness, I can't wait. What does it feel like to get to be the person who tells these stories? These big stories. What does it feel like to get to be a person in this very niche space, but such a needed space that gets to tell these stories? And then the stories are evergreen. The stories are never gonna grow old.
SPEAKER_02If it's someone else's story, you know, it's a privilege to be able to share their story. Hopefully I got it right. You know, I'm honoring and respecting their story. Super important. It's also, I think, a privilege to write books. And this is very important for me with regard to kids in particular, where kids see themselves on the pages and they see their story being told. So what an honor.
SPEAKER_01I'd love for us to go now to the first book. It's called Edie for Equality, written by Michael Genhard and illustrated by Cheryl Thuesday. Edie Windsor stands up for love. This is published by Lee and Lowe Books in 2025. This is a picture book biography. It's it tells the story of Edie Windsor, the woman who lost her spouse after being married to her spouse for over 40 years. Her spouse was Thea Spire. She sued the U.S. government for treating their marriage as if it didn't exist and won. Right? So this case helped bring down DOMA, the Defense of Marriage Act. Before you read, tell us a little bit about how you came to this story and why Edie.
SPEAKER_02I've been following the story ever since it broke about her case, and I was impressed for many reasons. A here was this 80-year-old woman. She was in her 80s when this happened, who was standing up for justice. Not just for herself and Thea, but for all of us. Right. She was instrumental in bringing down the first half of DOMA, a Burgerfell, brought down the second half in 2015, two years later. To answer your question, I didn't want her case to be, or her story rather to be buried under a Burgerfell because her work along with Robbie Kaplan, her attorney, was instrumental in changing history in this country because it paved the way for a same-sex marriage in this country. So it was compelling her story to me for many, many reasons, ultimately because it was a fight for equal rights, right? And we've been fighting and will continue to fight for equal rights until we don't need to. Yeah, I really wanted kiddos to hear her story because it's also important for me. I want to contribute to the body of picture books for kids that capture queer history.
SPEAKER_03Absolutely.
SPEAKER_02I thought I would start with the opening quote. This is a quote from Obama. America's long journey towards equality has been guided by countless small acts of persistence and fueled by the stubborn willingness of quiet heroes to speak out for what's right. Few were as small in stature as Edie Windsor, and few made as big a difference to America. I love that quote. So that was President Obama, because he really captures her impact. She was a tiny woman, again, who made a big impact. Okay, so in United States versus Windsor, case number 570 US744 in 2013. Robbie stood, Robbie Kaplan, uh Edie's attorney, stood before nine Supreme Court justices and argued, quote, gay married couples' relationships are not significantly different from the relationships of straight married people. End of quote. Robbie shared that Edie and Thea had loved each other for close to forty-four years in sickness and in health, but now Edie was being told that her marriage wasn't real and was being treated differently. That, Robbie argued, was called discrimination. It was unfair, unequal.
SPEAKER_03Wow.
SPEAKER_02Thank you, Cheryl, and her beautiful artwork.
SPEAKER_03Absolutely.
SPEAKER_02When Edie and Robbie left the Supreme Court, a wild roar erupted from the crowd outside with people shouting, Edie, Edie. Three months later, the Supreme Court justices reached their decision. They agreed. Doma was unconstitutional. The US government had to treat Edie and Thea's marriage like all other legal marriages. Though she was tiny in stature, Edie had become a giant symbol for equality at 84 years old. Standing on the shoulders of so many activists who came before her, Edie Windsor helped her country fix a great unfairness. Although the fight for equal rights continues, Edie proved that love is love and that equal means equal. And that adds up every time. So what a day that was in this country. Actually, that day because it was in the Frameline is a big queer film festival here in San Francisco. It's the largest actually in the world. And it was announced during, I think it was the last film, and the crowd went cuckoo.
SPEAKER_01Yes.
SPEAKER_02You know.
SPEAKER_01Oh, what a historic moment. And what a great place to be for that.
SPEAKER_02I know. I know.
SPEAKER_01Oh my goodness.
SPEAKER_02Very celebratory, of course.
SPEAKER_01Oh my goodness. Thank you so much for beautiful reading, beautiful excerpt. I love the way you frame it through her love of math. It started early in the book and then it sort of comes, it makes its way, you know, right back around that numbers added up correctly every time. Equal meant equal. And then asking, so why doesn't that apply to us? It's really a very precise way to make a child feel the injustice. Right. You're thinking about if this and this are together, then why can't that actually be right? Did you find that in the research, or was that always an entry point for you to have it connect to the math and her love of math?
SPEAKER_02Oh, I found that in the research when I I mean, Edie, really, God bless her, handed me her story, really, because when I read her biography, which was published a few years before she died, she talked a lot about in her childhood her love of math. I'm like, are you kidding me? And it was because you always got the correct answer. You always could find a correct answer, and that equal meant equal. Secondly, her favorite subject in school was civics. She loved learning about injustices.
SPEAKER_03Oh, yes, correct them.
SPEAKER_02So again, I thought, are you kidding me? Because this is a book for children, you have to start the story, in my opinion, with a hook for children. Yes. Because kids are not going to be interested in a story about an eighty-four. Year old woman, unless it's grandma. Yes. We're not going to. And so I had to enter the story where a child would be interested immediately. I enter the story with Edie as a child, loving math and loving civics. So the story goes on from there. So it was through the research, through her own words in her biography.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Ross Powell How do you think about what kids are ready to hold? What's the case that you make for a child's developmental capacity and their ability to be able to hold this story and really connect to it?
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell Well, I think we often don't give kids enough credit about what they can hear and what they can hold. You just have to tell the story in an age-appropriate way. That's developmentally appropriate. So you can touch on subjects like death and certainly unfairness, divorce, these are heavy topics if you do it right. If you do it in an age-appropriate way. It can inadvertently suggest that thing that matters doesn't matter.
SPEAKER_03Exactly.
SPEAKER_02You're not talking about it.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Avoiding.
SPEAKER_02Have to find your inner courage.
SPEAKER_03Yes.
SPEAKER_02To be assertive.
SPEAKER_00Yes.
SPEAKER_02And to speak clearly, right, about what it is that you're standing up for. Yeah. It reminds me of how movements get started. You know, we've heard the stories of that spark that started of the movement. That was certainly true at Compton Cafeteria, which predated Stonewall. And in an Ed's story, there is an unrest. It starts with an unrest within an individual and often a lot of individuals, who then just get fed up. And then something happens. Like in Edie's case, her relationship was treated unfairly. And as you mentioned, she was grieving, but she was also angry. A combination of angry, this is unfair, this is not right, and upset. And then something happens. And now there's a kind of urgency to turn that into action. That's how when you have followers, right? But that is how movements grow.
SPEAKER_01Spanish is the language of my family. This is published by Holiday House, 2023 publication. Five-starred reviews. It won the Tomás Rivera Award. This one comes directly from your mother's stories. Can you set it up for us?
SPEAKER_02Yeah. And Jeanne Parra was the illustrator of this book. I recall when I was starting school, my mom would share stories about when she started school. This is in Southern California. And her first language was Spanish. In fact, she only spoke Spanish when she started public school. And at that time in U.S. history, actually over a 50-year period from 1918 to 1968, there were English-only laws, which meant you can only speak English in public schools. This was a federal law, but different states enforced it differently. And in particular, from California to Texas, where there are a lot of brown families, they enforced it severely. And so it the whole thing is was humiliating, shaming, harmful, and in some cases traumatic. Because when you're telling a child, they and they would tell them that your language is dirty, ugly. That's going to impact your self-esteem. And so I thought, my God, this is beyond awful. And I wanted to tell that story because it's I like to tell untold history in stories too. And the more I did research, the more I discovered just how awful this was. I actually found a recording, documentary of that adults made recalling their childhood. Interestingly, they all were became educators.
SPEAKER_03Yes.
SPEAKER_02Yes, we know educators, anyway, reflecting on what they experience. And so I often share clips of that with kids, older kids who get it. They get it immediately. And kids asking very provocative, right-on questions like, why was that even a thing? How was that even possible? And so I get to talk about racism. What happens when folks are treated differently because of the color of their skin, or in this case, the language they speak, made to feel less than, really want to hear and have discussions about their stories. And I want to be part of that because if we don't remember history, it repeats. We know that. And so it really back to this idea of privilege. It is a privilege to have that, play that role with kids who are our future leaders. That's the setup for sharing now this part of the story. So this is the story of a little boy who enters the Spanish spelling bee, which is a real thing, actually. It's about 15 years old. It was started by David Budiceño because his parents went through the same shaming. He wanted to do something that turned shame into pride. He wanted to reclaim the dignity that was taken from these kids. So a little boy enters the Spanish Bill and B and he asks his grandmother to help him study. When she studies with me, my builder share stories of when she was a little girl. She tells me things were very different back then. The rule at school was English only. Speaking Spanish was not allowed. Manolito El Spanol no Saba Permitido. She explains. Abuela tells me on the playground we would sneak in Spanish. You did, I asked. But we get in big trouble, Abuela continues, if we ever got caught. We were punished, she tells me, and we were told that Spanish and anyone who spoke it was wrong or worse. I was sent home for speaking Spanish to a classmate Abuela remembers. I feel so sad hearing this and her other stories. Your auntie, The Pancha, got spanked with a paddle for every Spanish word she spoke, and Miamigita Kika had her mouth washed out with soap for speaking Spanish. So here in the story, I introduce spelling with the kids, and many times when I share the story with kids they spell along with me. Feya is ugly. Susia is dirty. Se o S U se I Abuela and my family are not ugly, bad or dirty. I work even harder. Practico y practico comia. I must remember that some words have special letters and accents. Daniel is harm. Bilingue is bilingual. B E L A E N E U con Die says I am climbing a high mountain. I know I can reach the top. Just like I know I can win this spelling bee. Tengo fuerza. I love Jampada's illustrations. This story does a lot of heavy lifting, and so you have to figure out how do you enter a story that kids can hear and digest. So the talk about research, finding out about the national spelling bee, Spanish spelling bee, gave me what I needed because I the Spanish spelling bee is a character in this book.
SPEAKER_01I think a lot with our guests who carry multiple marginalized identities, and you being one of them as well, does it ever feel like the world wants you to pick one? Like you're the Latino author or you're the queer author. Do those lanes get imposed on you from the outside? Or is it really sort of how you define it for yourself?
SPEAKER_02I think as authors, we get to decide because you pick the topics that you write about. And I mean, if you write within the queer space, for example, and only within the queer space, your name is probably going to be associated with those titles and that genre. If you write beyond that, then of course you're going to be known if your book gets attention for those other topics and other ways of storytelling about different subjects. I am now playing more and more with the intersection of identity. So for example, my next book that's out next year is called Mariposa. And it's not what you think it's about. If you know it's the Spanish word for butterfly. Mariposa is also a really ugly slang word for being queer in the Spanish-speaking countries, many of them. It's ugly, it's faggot. And I certainly heard that, you know, growing up and like, no, I'm tired of those words. And so I wanted to challenge from within the culture the use of that word, because every culture has ugly words for queer. And I'm tired of it. And so I write this, wrote this book that challenges that word, but in a very, I think, beautiful way. It's the story of a queer kid. You just know he's queer, but it's how his grandmother, who also knows, just loves him. And it's really the story of the importance of loving adults who because that's what it takes, you know, a loving adult who is your champion.
SPEAKER_00Yes.
SPEAKER_02Right. And in this story, she is, and the outside world reminds him of the ugly version of Mariposa, and she gently shows them what to do. Yes. And how to stand up taller, et cetera. And so to your question about are you pigeonholed essentially? Uh who determines that? Well, the author, I think, does. And so that's why I want to play with the intersection of identities. Queer Latino. And this is a subject that I wanted to write about for a long time. And the hardest part of storytelling, I have to say, is figuring out how to tell that story, how to enter the story for children.
SPEAKER_00Of course.
SPEAKER_02This is another heavy subject. How do you tell it? You tell it through the lens of a love story between a loving adult and her grandson. But the meat of it, kids understand, is embedded in that love story. Published by Neoporter Books and illustrated by Carlos Saponte, Cuckoo Talented, that comes out next year.
SPEAKER_01I dare say that the book that you've just talked about, Mariposa, that's coming out next year, and we can't wait to see that. And the ones that you shared today have this very intentional positioning of a safe space, of a psychological safety that's built in. You know, with Edie, it was her chosen family, members of her community who were there for her. It was Thea for 40 odd years. Spanish is the language of my family. It's it's Abuela who's really sitting there to say, yes, this happened and let me just tell you this, but you know, you can feel safe to come to me and talk to me about history or whatever it is that's going on with you. That is intentional. And I think it's such a very important part of what means the most to your audience. Your target audience. Yes, life is rough, and seek out your safe spaces to give you that push when you need it most, to make you feel like it's okay.
SPEAKER_03Yes.
SPEAKER_02In life, that safe feeling that allows you to be who you are just as you are, unapologetically. And so that's so critical. Because the opposite, of course, is damaging and turns into bad things in life, you know, when you feel of lesser value or no value, and what crushes hope and any kind of ambition you might have had. So safety is critical. So thank you for pointing that out as a common theme. I'm glad that comes across.
SPEAKER_01We're about to wrap up here, and there are a couple of things, one of which is something we we do with every guest. We always ask a signature question that really ties the theme of being an uncommon mind or having an uncommon approach to how you do your work and how you walk in the world to what you do. And my question for you is this show, this podcast is about people who challenge mainstream thinking, who, you know, sort of color outside the lines for a lack of a different way to say it. And you do that in two very different rooms. You do that in the therapy room, you do it in the picture book author writer's room. Which one, honestly, do you think changes minds more?
SPEAKER_02I'm gonna modify your question somewhat. Please take that. Please. I think both. I don't know if yeah, which one is more important than the other. So I would choose both. But I would also sort of pick out the word changing, because as a therapist, for example, as I mentioned, you're in this very intimate space listening to someone's story. My job is not to change someone's mind, because that's to me, that's arrogant. My job is, though, to create a safe space in which to explore, to investigate, to unpack, to listen to what is being shared. And if I can create a space where together we can see a new way of looking at something, a new perspective. But that comes from this joint work, this conversation that we're having, that the person I'm talking to sees that I'm not delivering, you know, I'm not doing the changing. That's a much more powerful experience for that person to come to that realization after doing this work of exploration. Similarly, I believe in a good picture book, you create a story from which conversations happen. And now we have discussions about what happened. What do you think about this or that? And kids have all kinds of opinions and they will share them. And if that opens doors for new perspectives that they come to because they read someone's story, right? But if I can create an opportunity through a book to have a reader be interested in the story and then later have conversations with peers or parents or teachers, now you have a child who is interested with a working brain who engage more in that subject matter and maybe come out of that with a different perspective.
SPEAKER_01We've heard about mariposa. Are there other books on the horizon that are coming out next year or later this year?
SPEAKER_02Aaron Ross Powell So things uh so mariposa is coming out, and I also have another biography coming out about Judy Baca, who is a uh Chicana, lesbian, Latina or Latina and muralist who painted the longest mural in the world in Southern California. Stunningly beautiful art. This is 20 28 to 28. No sabo Gabo comes out after that. And that's a companion book to Spanish as a language of my family.
SPEAKER_03Wonderful.
SPEAKER_02Which, as we just heard, is a story of kids who are shamed for speaking Spanish. Many of those kids grew up and they stopped speaking Spanish to their children. A lot of Latinos now in this country that don't speak any Spanish, and they're called Nosabo kids. No sé, but it's a common mistake, no sabo. So they're called Nosabo kids, and that's the story of kids who are being judged or shamed for not speaking Spanish. So kind of a full circle. Interesting moment comes out. It's so crazy in this field. You get a book acquired and it comes out three or four years later. That's the first thing.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02So it's in 2020.
SPEAKER_01The baby is born three or four years later.
SPEAKER_02I know. I know. Very long gestation period. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. Michael, this is all just so, so exciting. Thank you again for joining us. The links to both books, ED4 Equality, Spanish is the language of my family, will be in the show notes, along with your website. Folks, put these books in your hands, in the hands of your children, put them on your shelves, give them to the kids in your life and just let the questions come. And if this conversation meant something to you, listen, re-listen as often as possible, share it, because that's how Uncommon Minds grows. And until next time, keep being uncommon. Michael, thank you so much for joining us.
SPEAKER_02Thank you for having me, Shelley. Thank you so much.
SPEAKER_01Thanks for joining us for another amazing episode of Uncommon Minds. If you like what you've heard, please like, share, and subscribe on any of the major podcast platforms. And if you are on Instagram, please follow us at Uncommon Minds Pod. We'd love to hear from you, share your thoughts. Also, like and share the information that you see there because it's always fun and it's always uncommon. See you soon. This podcast was edited by Resonate Recordings.