Author was a champion of black children’s literature

Toni Trent Parker, an author who helped advance the cause of books featuring African-American children, died Thursday at her home in Stamford, Conn. She was 58.

In order to increase the visibility of black children in children’s books, Parker and two friends, Donna Rand and Sheila Foster, established a company to help promote such books and later wrote a series of four guides, Black Books Galore! Guide to Great African American Children’s Books. The guides were first published in 1998.

Children’s picture books featuring or including minority children were largely absent from the publishing scene before the 1960s, when the first few were published and authors and other advocates began criticizing what they viewed as prejudice in the publishing industry, said Leonard S. Marcus, a book reviewer for Parenting magazine.

By promoting sales, raising awareness and adding to the literature, Parker helped bring more books with black children into the mainstream, he said.

In 1998, Parker established Kids Cultural Books, a non-profit organization that holds book festivals around the country to bring multicultural books and their authors together with children. The organization received a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in 2000.

Parker wrote six children’s picture books, including holiday books and a keepsake book, all picturing black children. Her most recent title, Sienna’s Scrapbook, portrays a young AfricanAmerican girl and her family visiting black cultural and historical sites in the United States.

Toni Trent Parker was born in 1947 in Winston-Salem, N. C. She received a bachelor’s degree in history from Oberlin College in Oberlin, Oh., in 1970, and did graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley.

The New York Times