One of my favorite things about social media is finding multicultural people that are passionate about diversity, culture, about children’s literature, and that they have combined their knowledge, expertise, and imagination to create amazing books for children and the youth. Enter, Dr. Rajani LaRocca, an Indian American primary care physician and award-winning author who grew up reading anything she could find, cereal boxes, comic books, magazine articles, and novels. “Books inspired me to pursue medicine as a career; they helped me yearn to live in a different world and they helped me to consider what it is like to live in someone else’s shoes.”
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A Harvard Medical School graduate that trained in Internal Medicine in Massachusetts General Hospital, Rajani began writing children’s books in 2013. She loves to write picture books and middle-grade novels in prose and poetry, nonfiction, and fiction with puzzles or riddles, and fiction with a touch of magic.
She was born in Bangalore, India. Her parents emigrated to the United States when she was a baby and she spent most of her childhood in Louisville, Kentucky where her parents would speak Kannada with each other but English was the majority language at home. “What we lacked on language, we made up for with culture. Our Indian culture was everywhere in our lives growing up from food to music to traditions. I am grateful I can share that with my children today!”
Rajani’s novel, Red, White and Whole won the 2021 New England Book Award in Middle Grade and is a Washington Post, a New York Library, School Library Journal, and Book Page Best Book of 2021. Her book, Much Ado about Baseball, is a story about a girl and a boy that love math and find themselves in the same baseball team. Her picture book, Seven Golden Rings, is a tale about music and math. She has two books in Spanish: El Dulce y Alocado Verano de Mimi and a bilingual English/Spanish edition of Bracelets for Bina’s Brothers coming out next in Spring 2022.
Rajani loves to cook and shares her Indian food with her children. Their favorite dish? Kesari Bhath, a south Indian dish made with rava (cream of wheat), semolina, ghee, saffron, nuts, and sugar.
When I asked Rajani why we should raise grateful children, especially grateful for their heritage, she answered, “I believe that promoting diversity with books and in our everyday life leads to empathy and empathy makes the world a better place. Being grateful for our roots and teaching our children to appreciate where they came from can lead to this amazing multicultural world that we all call home!”
For more about Rajani follow her on Instagram @rajanilarocca.
Thank you so much for your time, Dr. LaRocca!
