Soul Looks Back in Wonder

The improbable life story of Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) included a peculiarly gothic childhood in Ireland during which he was successively abandoned by his mother, his father and his guardian; two decades in the United States, where he worked as a journalist and was sacked for marrying a former slave; and a long period in Japan, where he married a Japanese woman and wrote about Japanese society and aesthetics for a Western readership. His ghost stories, which were drawn from Japanese folklore and influenced by Buddhist beliefs, appeared in collections throughout the 1890s and 1900s. He is a much celebrated figure in Japan.

Tom Feelings has received numerous awards for his art in books. In 1972, he was the first African-American artist to win a Caldecott Honor, for Moja Means One: Swahili Counting Book, and in 1975 he won a second Caldecott Honor for Jambo Means Hello: Swahili Alphabet Book, both written by Muriel Feelings. Mr. Feelings taught art at the University of South Carolina. It was during that time he published perhaps his best-known work, The Middle Passage, which won the 1996 Coretta Scott King Award. Mr. Feelings was working on finishing his last picture book, I Saw Your Face, a collaboration with the poet Kwame Dawes, not long before his death in 2003.