Harriet Rohmer

In 1975, Harriet Rohmer founded Children's Book Press (CBP). The San Francisco-based publisher was one of the first to offer bilingual and multicultural literature for children. During the 1980s, she traveled to South America, collecting indigenous stories that had never before been written down. After 26 years, Rohmer is leaving CBP to pursue some of her other passions, such as writing short stories for adults and exploring the potential of the Internet to teach kids about the arts.

What was the inspiration behind launching Children's Book Press?

I would take my son to the Head Start center, which was actually in the Mission District of San Francisco. I had very deliberately selected a bilingual day care center for my son—and that's a whole other story. But I would drop him off and pick him up at the end of the workday, and I would see that the teachers were reading to the children, different storybooks…. This, of course, was a very diverse day care center. Maybe half the children were from different Spanish-speaking countries; there were many African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, and my own son, a Jewish American. So, I noticed that day the teacher was reading a picture book called Eloise at the Plaza, which you may be familiar with. It's a very lovely book. It's about a little girl who lives at the Plaza Hotel in New York City and is catered to by all sorts of people…. It occurred to me that many of these children had come from migrant backgrounds, had come from rural areas in the South, had come from a completely different background [than Eloise], and they were sort of looking and listening with blank faces. And it occurred to me that we really needed something different for our children.

How far have multicultural books for kids come since you first started?

The world has changed somewhat. There are more opportunities for people of color, opportunities that really didn't exist back then. On the other hand, there are other issues—issues of class. I think people today are grappling with all sorts of different things. I talk about this because I think children's literature always reflects what's going on in the larger culture. So, yes, I think things are better. I think there are a lot of beautiful children's books that reflect different cultures—some of them [done] very well, others not so well.