Eugenie Fernandes

""Miss Lou" is widely credited as having helped Jamaican Patois recognized as a "nation language." Thanks to her writing and her work in TV and radio, Jamaican Patois was embraced internationally and she created spaces for poets like Mutabaruka and Linton Kwesi Johnson and singers like Bob Marley and Harry Belafonte to centralize and popularize Jamaican English, Creole, patois in their work. This picture book manuscript focuses on a young Miss Lou...

Based on a true story about a young Kenyan boy whose mother left him but had named him Muthini which meant suffering because he was born with no fingers on his left hand and only two on his right. Many times he was made fun of or avoided which hurt him deeply. He lives with his very elderly grandmother, his Nyanya, along with many cousins whose parents had either died or left them. They are extremely poor and there is never enough money or food, but...