Sweet People Are Everywhere

www.sweetpeopleareeverywhere.com

A beautiful picture book from Pulitzer prize winner Alice Walker’s large-hearted poem.  This poem is a powerful celebration of humanity and globalism. It addresses a young American boy getting his first passport and walks the boy and therefore the reader through a series of countries, focusing on the “sweet people” to be found all over the world.

Written by Walker in 2013, the poem’s generosity of spirit is inspiring, and its themes are both timely and timeless.

The evocative free verse poem was published in Walker’s bilingual poetry collection Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart (2018), winner of the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work. Library Journal praised the book for its “poems of love and hope,” and in a starred review Booklist commended Walker’s “prodding wisdom of an elder suggesting that we can cope by taking comfort in beauty, friendship, and human kindness; by always expressing gratitude; and by turning inward to hold ourselves accountable for what we contribute.”

In the poem, after journeying through dozens of countries and pointing out the sweet people in each of them, Walker writes these beautiful, hopeful, and haunting words:
 

“We are lost
If we can no longer experience
how sweet human beings can be.

Promise me never
to forget this.”

 

"What a wonderful addition to the shelves of intercultural literature. This is a book for little and big humans alike" - Karen Katz, bestselling author and illustrator