Pumped with exhilarating vitality and willpower, a smiling younger cheetah sprints throughout a tall, swaying savannah on the quilt of MG Prezioso ’13’s “Charlie’s Huge Race.” Thick, bubble-gum pink and yellow sweatband and all.
Prezioso’s eye-catching youngsters’s guide is the primary in her Entire Wilde World Sequence, a set of kids’s books created to spotlight, introduce, clarify, and normalize persistent well being circumstances and allergy symptoms in a approach that’s relatable and digestible to younger audiences. Every web page bursts with informative phrases, animated, colourful backgrounds, and with much more cute characters.
As an undergraduate at Harvard, Prezioso was an English concentrator and avid theatre participant on the Faculty. Nonetheless, she didn’t truly start to pursue her curiosity in inventive writing till after she graduated. Now a Dunster resident tutor and PhD candidate on the Harvard Graduate Faculty of Schooling, Prezioso’s work primarily focuses on storytelling in literature.
“My analysis focuses on how youngsters get absorbed or immersed in books and the way that influences numerous points of their social-emotional id, studying outcomes, and cognitive improvement,” she stated.
Prezioso can also be working together with her advisor to research the worth of literature and its position in remodeling our society. Her educational pursuits allowed her to naturally pivot in direction of creating literature for youthful audiences.
“Charlie’s Huge Race” facilities the story of Charlie the Cheetah, a loveable character whose goals of working within the Grassland Truthful and Video games Race are momentarily interrupted when her lungs begin to “whistle and squeak” throughout her intense bodily exercise. On a go to to Dr. Wilde’s workplace, Charlie shortly turns into identified with bronchial asthma, learns to make use of an inhaler, and accepts this new aspect of her id earlier than happening to win the annual area day, proving to all younger readers that persistent sicknesses are part of what makes an individual distinctive and received’t cease somebody from reaching their objectives.
When requested why she selected to make bronchial asthma the central theme of the primary guide in her youngsters’s sequence, Prezioso relayed her private connection to the persistent sickness. Each Prezioso and her sister have had bronchial asthma since they have been youngsters, so she has intensive firsthand expertise with dwelling with the situation.
Along with her private expertise, bronchial asthma is among the commonest persistent circumstances for teenagers. Regardless of bronchial asthma being so widespread amongst youngsters, it stays unusual to see tales showcasing it or different medical subjects in youngsters’s books.
“I believe there are books that exist that grapple with these subjects, however I believe they’re a bit lengthy and a bit too informational typically,” Prezioso stated. “Maybe there’s simply an overload of data and it’s not as digestible for teenagers. That’s what this guide is attempting to do — to offer a software that’s going to be straightforward for teenagers to know that’s hopefully fulfilling.”
Even when a reader doesn’t expertise bronchial asthma, meals allergy symptoms, or persistent sickness, Prezioso defined that everybody can profit from figuring out finest maintain youngsters secure and normalize the sickness.
“There’s a lot to say — not solely about offering data for teenagers as a software for once they get identified, but in addition about destigmatizing it, having conversations about that as part of youngsters’ id, and celebrating that half that makes you distinctive,” she stated.
When requested to present any recommendation to undergraduate college students that is likely to be contemplating writing their very own youngsters’s guide, Prezioso inspired college students to completely go for it and discover the area.
“First determine whether or not or not your guide could be properly suited to a conventional publishing home or whether or not you primarily wish to be the inventive, the founder, the coordinator, the researcher in addition to the author,” she stated. “If that’s the case, self-publishing is a extremely superb outlet for that. The enjoyment of self-publishing is attending to be concerned each step of the way in which.”
Prezioso described the method of making this guide as extremely rewarding and exhilarating.
“It feels so thrilling to have a completed product, to begin with an concept and see it by way of to the very finish,” she stated.
With the creation of this guide, Prezioso needs everybody to know that this style of medical youngsters’s books is likely to be seen as a distinct segment market, however that it doesn’t must be.
“Sure, meals allergy symptoms or persistent circumstances are a subset of the inhabitants, however it’s so vital to have all youngsters find out about these points and subjects and have the ability to acknowledge them and assist their classmates,” Prezioso stated. “To have them destigmatized and feeling like they’re accepted and included and that everybody is working with kindness and empathy for what it means to dwell with these types of circumstances.”
—Workers author Katherrin A. Billordo could be reached at katherrin.billordo@thecrimson.com.
