Eve LaPlante
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Who Needs a Statue? receives International Literacy Association Award

7/8/2025

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Who Needs a Statue? won the 2025 Notable Books for a Global World Award from the ILA for “outstanding books for readers in PreK to 12th grades that provide a variety of perspectives, lived experiences, and authentic stories showing the depth of global identities.” 

Who Needs a Statue? by Eve LaPlante and Margy Burns Knight. Illus. by Alix Delinois (2024). Tilbury House Publishers. 
Did you know that the United States Capitol houses 100 statues, two from each of the 50 states? Until 2000, when Congress allowed states to replace their statues, every statue but ten represented a white man. Even after 25 years of this policy change, only nine statues now depict people of color and just 12 feature women. Across the country, statues are being added and removed, prompting the question: Who needs a statue? The authors feature state statues of women and people of color, prompting readers to reconsider whose stories history remembers. Among these are Barbara Jordan, the first African American woman elected to the Texas State Senate, and labor activists fighting for immigrant farmers, Dolores Huerta and César Chávez, who co-founded the United Farm Workers movement in 1962. With detailed backmatter providing further information on each person represented, this timely book reminds us that history isn’t just about who has been remembered; it’s also about who should be. (Gr 3 Up)

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Bosworth Lecture on Anne Hutchinson in Bristol, Rhode Island

11/26/2024

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Thank you to DeWolf Fulton and folks in Bristol, Rhode Island, who invited me to give this year's Bosworth Lecture about Anne Hutchinson, to InkWood Books for selling copies of American Jezebel and Who Needs a Statue? and to Dave Weed for videotaping and posting the lecture on YouTube: https://youtu.be/-0iDXbUu4Ds 
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The Bosworth Lecture at the First Congregational Church in Bristol, Rhode Island
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DeWolf Fulton, Craig Clark, Eve LaPlante, David Dorfman, and Dave Weed at the Anne Hutchinson Memorial Founders Brook Park, Portsmouth, RI
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Signing AMERICAN JEZEBEL and WHO NEEDS A STATUE?
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Booklist gives WHO NEEDS A STATUE? a starred review!

10/29/2024

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Margy, Alix, and I just heard that Booklist will give Who Needs a Statue? a starred review. Excerpts from the upcoming review:  “Innovative... This inclusive and fresh approach to communities will pep up local history collections... Expressive illustrations captured with a dynamic color palate portray kids posing next to sculptures, imitating poses, or seemingly engaged in conversation, adding immediacy to the bronze and marble works.”
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Teaching for Change votes for WHO NEEDS A STATUE? for social justice

8/12/2024

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Kirkus Reviews Who Needs A Statue?

7/19/2024

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WHO NEEDS A STATUE?
BY EVE LAPLANTE & MARGY BURNS KNIGHT; ILLUSTRATED BY ALIX DELINOIS ‧ OCT. 15, 2024
A gallery of intrepid American groundbreakers, pathfinders, and activists who have earned commemorative statues. 
Starting at the U.S. Capitol and ranging as far afield as an airport in Austin, Texas, and a park in Napa, California, the book covers more than a dozen figures—all either women, people of color, or both—who have been immortalized in stone or bronze. Many of the names will likely be unfamiliar to young readers. Beginning with Thocmetony Sarah Winnemucca, the first published Native American woman author, and continuing on past the inspirational likes of Anne Hutchinson (who was banished from colonial Massachusetts for illegally teaching men), comet discoverer Maria Mitchell, and Olympians and activists Tommie Smith and John Carlos, each entry features a brief but sonorous initial annotation and a more detailed one in the backmatter that identifies the statues’ sculptors. Delinois’ painterly images don’t always capture the individual style or character of the monuments the way photos would have, but he does take advantage of his medium to add homey or historical flourishes, such as a view of Deborah Sampson—who dressed in men’s clothes in order to fight in the American Revolution—blasting away at a group of redcoats and an image of a child in a wheelchair seated next to a chatty effigy of Everglades advocate Marjory Stoneman Douglas in a garden near Miami. An oblique closing reference to commemorative statues being removed or replaced in many localities ends this powerful recitation on a cogent note. 
Deserving but less prominent luminaries shine more brightly here. (Informational picture book. 7-10)
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Marmee & Louisa ebook is Amazon bestseller!

5/20/2024

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In the Kindle Store, Marmee & Louisa is the

          #2 bestseller in Lawyer & Judge Biographies

          
#4 bestseller in
 Biographies & Memoirs of Authors
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Picture book about statues due in October from Tilbury House Publishers

5/15/2024

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Announcing my first book for children,

Who Needs A Statue?

coauthored by Margy Burns Knight with
full-color illustrations by Alix Delinois!


Did you know the U.S. Capitol Building features one hundred statues, two from each state?  
Whom did states choose, and why? How well do they represent our multifaceted country?


Who Needs A Statue? takes readers from the Capitol Building on a tour of the country in search of statues of brave women and people of color.

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American Jezebel ebook is Amazon bestseller!

4/29/2021

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The American Jezebel ebook is Amazon's #70 bestseller overall and the #1 bestseller in:
           History of the U.S./United States History
              Women in History

                 History of LGBTQ+ & Gender Studies/Women's Studies    
                    Biographies & Memoirs of  Women
                       Historical U.S. Biographies

Go, Anne!

          

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New Preface to the Korean translation of SEIZED

4/1/2021

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Seized is being published in Korea, 28 years after it came out in the United States. The Korean publisher asked me to write a new preface, to Korean readers, which enabled me to consider again the controversy I encountered after publishing my first book.

TO KOREAN READERS
     I am pleased to share with you my book about temporal lobe epilepsy, a common neurological disorder that affects an estimated 200,000 Koreans. Despite being the most common form of epilepsy among adults, TLE has a history of being kept secret.
     Seized, the first book for a general audience ever written about TLE, came out in the United States in 1993 and received excellent reviews. Yet it was met with silence by the Epilepsy Foundation of America. It turned out that the EFA, in its mission to maintain a positive image and remove the stigma from epilepsy, avoided discussing anything considered controversial. The advocacy group actively suppressed information about TLE because of the disorder’s links with mental illness and personality change. In the words of Jeffrey Cummings, professor of neurology and psychiatry at UCLA, epilepsy associations “oppose the general idea of relating psychopathology and epilepsy,” a relationship that “has been repeatedly demonstrated.”
     The price of this secrecy is high. Preventing the flow of information about TLE curtails public awareness and hinders patient care. People with TLE are denied basic information about their disorder. Many people with the disorder wait years, even decades, for a correct diagnosis. In the meantime, they may be prescribed psychiatric medications, even institutionalized. Doctors suspect that some so-called “chronic schizophrenics” languishing in mental hospitals may in fact have this treatable form of epilepsy.  
     TLE should not be hidden. The public deserves to know about it, people with TLE agree, as attested to in hundreds of letters I’ve received from readers of Seized. I hope the arrival of Seized in Korea increases public awareness of this fascinating and revelatory disorder, and provides helpful information to TLE patients and their families and friends. 

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Story about Marmee in The New Yorker!

12/24/2019

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Sarah Blackwood has a fascinating article about Abigail May Alcott, Louisa's Marmee, in The New Yorker. For more about Abigail's writings, please read My Heart Is Boundless, which Laura Dern used in preparing to play Marmee in the new film.
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    Eve is the author of Who Needs A Statue?, Seized, American Jezebel, Marmee & Louisa, and Salem Witch Judge.

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