Interview with Rukhsana Khan
It’s no mystery that books are powerful. They teach us skills and history, and take us to places we’ve never been or that never existed. Many of the best books take us to a place inside of ourselves where we can connect with other stories and escape our own realities.
The Roses in my Carpets tells the story of a young boy, his mother and sister, living in a refugee camp. The camp serves merely as a setting for this family as we experience the common reality of feeling out of place while dealing with life around us.
Author Rukhsana Khan joins Mark to talk about how books saved her, writing politics out of children’s books and her thoughts on life as a marathon and books as sprints.
Photo provided by Rukhsana Khan.
I’ve had the privilege of interviewing authors, illustrators and book people of all walks of life and spanning both ends of careers. Today, I break new ground for me as I interview a six year-old who’s not my own daughter.
While her book 
We opened our 
We opened our 
As part of the second anniversary celebrations of the 
As we find ourselves soldiering into our fourth year of 
As we find ourselves soldiering into our fourth year of 
She can turn even the most reluctant — or, in her words, dormant — reader into a student who can’t put their books down. With talent and passion like that, it’s a benefit to children that she abandoned her career as an accountant to become a grade six language arts and social studies teacher.
There’s a cosmic connection between farm animals and children. So, as long as there are farms, we’ll have ample inspiration for children’s books.
There are parts of being in this world that many parents want to shield their children from. War, with its toll on lives, communities and countries is one of those controversial topics for children’s books that’s either hotly debated or blatantly dismissed.
Here’s something unusual… there’s a series of books, 17 strong, that have been growing in popularity in more than 24 countries since the first book came out in 1994. And, would you believe, these books are just now becoming available in the United States. The biggest market in the world is one of the last major markets to get on board.
