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Children’s Book Committee’s 2023 Best Children’s Book of the Year!
An Award Winning Children's Picture Book:
Middle East Outreach Council 2022 Picture Book Award
Bookstagang Best - Best Picture Book Biographies of 2022!
American Library Association - Selected for the Rise: A Feminist Book Project for Ages 0-18 (American Library Association)
MSNBC Gift Guide: 12 Incredible Books to Inspire Young Girls To Know Their Value. "Read this if you want a powerful and moving story about how sometimes rules are meant to be broken….beautifully-illustrated ...introduces readers to the idea that unfair rules can be changed." — Ciarra Chavarria, @girlsreadtheworld via MSNBC.com
Tinybeans - The Best New Children’s Books of 2022
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Sunflowers are known for their large, bright yellow (and sometimes other colors) heads that are actually made up of thousands of tiny flowers called florets.
Sunflowers primarily symbolize happiness, positivity, and unwavering loyalty, stemming from their bright, sunny appearance and tendency to follow the sun throughout the day. They also represent strength, good luck, and longevity.
Learn more about our book author
Coming out Fall of 2027
Authored by Uma Mishra-Newbery Illustrated by Mariam Quraishi Astra/Minerva, Fall 2027
A lyrical, mindfulness-centered picture book about a young girl and her tabla-playing grandfather, exploring emotional awareness through rhythm and sound.
(Rights sold: World | Agent: Jessica Craig, Craig Literary)
Bibliography (Uma Mishra-Newbery)
PUBLISHED
Loujain Dreams of Sunflowers
Co-authored with Lina AlHathloul | Illustrated by Rebecca Green Astra Books for Young Readers, 2022 ISBN: 9781662650642
A picture book inspired by the true story of Saudi women’s rights activist Loujain AlHathloul—honoring courage, imagination, and the power of dreaming big.
FORTHCOMING
Breathe the Rhythm of Your Heart
Illustrated by Mariam Quraishi Astra/Minerva, Fall 2027
A lyrical, mindfulness-centered picture book about a young girl and her tabla-playing grandfather, exploring emotional awareness through rhythm and sound.
(Rights sold: World | Agent: Jessica Craig, Craig Literary)
ON SUBMISSION
Home Is Here: A Love Letter to Belonging
Poetic vignettes that explore diasporic identity, intergenerational memory, and the many ways children find “home” across lands, languages, and lineage.
Which Chili Dances on Your Tongue
A sensory journey through the chilies in a masala dabba, uncovering the ancestral stories, landscapes, and heat each one carries.
IN DEVELOPMENT
(Untitled Partition Picture Book)
A multi-generational story of memory, migration, and return, told through a child’s journey with their grandparent back to pre-Partition Hyderabad.
Uma Mishra-Newbery is the author of Loujain Dreams of Sunflowers (Astra, 2022) and the forthcoming Breathe the Rhythm of Your Heart (Fall 2027). Her picture books Home Is Here: A Love Letter to Belonging and Which Chili Dances on Your Tongue are currently being shopped to publishers. She is also developing a new story about Partition and the legacy of intergenerational memory.
A storyteller, movement strategist, and somatic abolitionist, Uma’s work bridges systems change with soul-deep storytelling. Her books are rooted in rhythm, memory, and reclamation—centering cultural specificity, intergenerational wisdom, and the quiet power of identity unfolding in everyday life.
With poetic prose and sensory-rich imagery, she invites children—especially those navigating the in-between spaces of diaspora, language, and belonging—to listen closely to their hearts, their histories, and the land beneath them.
Across two decades of global advocacy, feminist leadership, and grassroots organizing, Uma has worked to center care, equity, and humanity. That same devotion lives in her writing—where tenderness and resistance meet, and where every story begins at home and arrives at the heart.