From WOOD COUNTY DISTRICT PUBLIC LIBRARY
Tickets are still available for the “From the South Bronx to Sesame Street: A Story of Inclusion & Belonging with Sonia Manzano.”
An author and performers, Manzano will speak as part of the Wood County District Library’s Foundation Series on Thursday, Oct. 12 at 7 p.m.
To register for this free event, visit wcdpl.org/sonia-manzano.
When you think of Sonia Manzano, you immediately think of children and television. Her most recent accomplishment was creating and developing, with Fred Rogers Productions, an animated children’s program, “Alma’s Way,” which premiered October 2021. It has won an Imagen Award for Best Youth Programming, and a 2022 Emmy nomination for Outstanding Writing for a Preschool Animated Program.
But what Ms. Manzano is best known for is performing the role of “Maria” on “Sesame Street” for 44 seasons, where her work affected the lives of millions of parents and children and garnered her two Emmy Award nominations in addition to the National Academy of Arts and Science’s Lifetime Achievement Daytime Emmy in 2016. As a writer for the show, she took home 15 Emmys and recently received the 2022 Beacon Award from PBS.
A first-generation mainland Puerto Rican, Sonia was raised in the South Bronx. In the early 1970’s a scholarship took her to Carnegie Mellon University where she participated in the creation of the Broadway show hit “Godspell.”
She is also an author whose work includes “No Dogs Allowed,” “A Box Full of Kittens,” and “Miracle on 133rd St.” for Simon and Schuster, “The Lowdown on the Highbridge” for BX Children’s Museum, “Becoming Maria: Love and Chaos in the South Bronx” and “The Revolution of Evelyn Serrano for Scholastic. Her most recent Scholastic novel, “Coming Up Cuban,” set in 1959, follows the lives of four children who represent different intersections of race and class during the Cuban Revolution.
