Multicultural Children’s Book Day (Read Your World Day) Date in the current year: January 25, 2024

Multicutural Children’s Book Day was launched in 2012 by Mia Wenjen from Pragmatic Mom and Valarie Budayr from Audrey Press Books, two reading and play advocates who were frustrated by a lack of multicultural and diverse kids’ books. They teamed up to raise awareness of children’s books that celebrate diversity and inclusion and to ensure the availability of such books at libraries and classrooms.

According to the founders of Multicutural Children’s Book Day, a good children’s books should have relatable characters; in other words, kids need to read about characters who look like them, talk like them, and share similar experiences. On the other hand, books should teach children that all people are different and that it is important to respect each other’s differences. This means that we need children’s books with diverse characters from different backgrounds, ethnicities, cultures, and religions.

Multicultural Children’s Book Day was created to highlight the importance of multicultural books for child development and to shine a spotlight on the amazing authors, illustrators, and publishers behind these books. At some point, the founders of Multicultural Children’s Book Day launched Read Your World, a nonprofit organization whose mission is exactly the same: to celebrate diversity in children’s literature and ensure kids around the world have access to multicultural books.

Multicultural Children’s Book Day is celebrated annually on the last Thursday of January, unless it coincides with International Holocaust Remembrance Day (January 27). In such a case, it is moved to the last Wednesday of January. The Read Your World campaign is ongoing, so you can join it at any moment. To this date, Read Your World has donated almost 11,000 diverse books to kids, and this number continues to grow thanks to all those people who donate books and participate in Multicultural Children’s Book Day.

There are many ways to get involved with Multicultural Children’s Book Day / Read Your World, regardless of who you are: an author, publisher, parent, teacher, blogger, librarian, or avid reader. You can participate by reviewing diverse children’s or young adult books and posting your reviews online (for example, on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Amazon, Goodreads), donating diverse children’s books to your local library, school or kindergarten (directly or via Read Your World), supporting any charity that promotes literacy, and spreading the word with the hashtag #ReadYourWorld.

If you’re a teacher or a librarian, you can reach out to Read Your World to get free diverse books for your classroom or library, as well as organize various activities for kids with a focus on diversity and inclusion. If you’re a parent, pick some new books for your kid (or kids) and teach them about the importance of respecting people of different ethnicities, cultures, religions, gender identities, sexual orientations, etc.