Mental Health Awareness Month with Author Lynn Joseph: My Code Word

Lynn's picture book, My Code Word: For When I'm Scared or Afraid, is a great recommendation to read during Mental Health Awareness Month or anytime of the year. It's a story about a young boy who acutely sees what's going on in the world and internalizes the negative things to a point where he begins to fear for his future. When everything seems most hopeless, his mother comes up with a clever solution to not only allay his fears, but teach the resilience needed to be a change agent and tackle the world head on. My Code Word is based on her own fears and emotions growing up and then as a mother of two young boys of color.

Lynn's novella The Color of My Words won an Américas Award for Children's and Young Adult Literature and a Jane Addams Children's Book Award. Some of her other books include: Coconut Kind of Day: Island Poems, featuring 13 poems narrated by a child describing her life in Trinidad, and An Island Christmas, describing a Trinidad Christmas from the child narrator's perspective.

Lynn is a lawyer and an award-winning author. Originally of Trinidad and Tobago, she has been based in the U.S. for her adult life and now splits her time between New York and Bermuda.