Celebrate Amazingness!
Ice dancers Maia and Alex Shibutani wrote a book celebrating Asian American and Pacific Islanders.
© Maia and Alex Shibutani
Maia and Alex Shibutani are Olympic medalists and authors!
Maia and Alex Shibutani are amazing. The sister and brother won bronze medals in ice dancing at the 2018 Olympics. And now, they’ve written a book about other amazing people. It’s called Amazing: Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders Who Inspire Us All.
The picture book tells the stories of 36 Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders who have done great things. (Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have ancestors from Asia or the islands in the Pacific Ocean. This includes more than 75 countries.)
© Penguin Random House
Maia and Alex Shibutani’s new book features 36 Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.
Some of the people in the book are athletes like Maia and Alex. Others are artists, actors, or scientists. And others worked to change U.S. laws that were unfair to Asian Americans or Pacific Islanders. Maia and Alex had a lot of people to choose from. They couldn’t fit everyone into one book, so they picked some of their favorites.
“Hopefully this will just be a wonderful introduction…to the Asian American and Pacific Islander communities,” Maia told CBS Mornings.
Why did Maia and Alex decide to write a book? Maia and Alex are Asian American—their family was originally from Japan. They didn’t see many Asian Americans in the books they read while they were growing up. There weren’t very many Pacific Islanders either. Maia and Alex hope that their new book will show kids that Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have made great contributions to the United States and the world.
