Details
Cost
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- FREE with paid museum admission. Children with a valid library card from any Palm Beach County library will receive free admission along with one accompanying adult by registering on the Palm Beach County Library’s website. For this discount advance registration is required, limited availability.
Date & Time
- Sunday, February 23, 2025
- 11:00am – 3:00pm
Schedule of Free Activities
- 11am -12:30pm (Theater) – Join Ms. Thompson for a reading of her children’s book Listening to Trees: George Nakashima, Woodcutter and learn about how to write a haiku/haibun. The participants will get an opportunity to create their own haiku with our garden as your inspiration. At the last 15 minutes of the workshop come back and share your haiku. Participants will get to a take home an instruction sheet to make an origami Mt. Fuji bookmark.
- 12:30pm -1pm & 2pm – 3pm- (Lobby) Book Signing with author Holly Thompson. The book will be available at the museum store (limited supplies while they last)
Listening to Trees: George Nakashima, Woodworker, by Holly Thompson, illustrated by Toshiki Nakamura (Neal Porter Books, Holiday House, 2024) is a poetic and moving picture book biography celebrating the life and work of the visionary Japanese American woodworker George Nakashima.
Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, George Nakashima began a love story with trees that grew throughout his remarkable life as architect, designer and woodworker. During World War II, George, with his wife Marion and their baby daughter, endured incarceration in Minidoka prison camp, where he drew comfort from the discipline of woodworking. Once free, George dedicated the rest of his life to crafting furniture from fallen or discarded trees, giving fresh purpose and dignity to each tree, and promoting a more peaceful world.
Author Holly Thompson narrates Nakashima’s life using haibun, a combination of haiku and prose, which twines smoothly through Toshiki Nakamura’s earthy illustrations. A foreword by Nakashima’s daughter Mira and robust history at the end of the book will deepen young readers’ understanding of woodworking and poetry and offer added insights to the work of a master artisan.
Meet Author
Holly Thompson (www.hatbooks.com), longtime resident of Japan, is the author of three verse novels for young people: Falling into the Dragon’s Mouth; The Language Inside; and Orchards–winner of the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature. She is also author of the picture book biography Listening to Trees: George Nakashima, Woodworker; The Wakame Gatherers about a girl gathering seaweed with two grandmothers; and the poetry picture books Twilight Chant and One Wave at a Time. She edited Tomo: Friendship Through Fiction—An Anthology of Japan Teen Stories featuring ten stories in translation. Holly is a graduate of the NYU Creative Writing Program and is a Regional Advisor Emeritus of SCBWI Japan. Now based in Massachusetts, she writes and translates poetry, fiction and nonfiction for children, teens and adults; teaches writing at Yokohama City University, Boston’s GrubStreet, and UC Berkeley Extension; and visits schools in Japan, the U.S. and places in between.
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