About Us
Dr. Bashi™ is an award-nominated social impact, independent, woman-and-minority owned publisher of critically-acclaimed social justice diverse children's books.
The first title in Dr. Bashi™ Diverse Social Justice Children's Books Series, is the 2017 critically acclaimed P is for Palestine: A Palestine Alphabet Book, a world-first and instant best-seller, followed by the globally-celebrated Counting Up the Olive Tree: A Palestine Number Book (2019) and the forthcoming semi-autobiographical Persian/English bilingual picture book The Spring Solstice New Year Festival: A Persian Nowruz Story from Iran & Afghanistan (TBA).
In 2013 and 2014, Dr. Bashi™ became recognized as the maker of the limited edition (now collectors items) world's first pedagogically-advanced, durable, gender and race conscious PERSIAN and ARABIC wooden building blocks in Vermont, USA.
In 2016, Dr. Bashi™ was nominated for the prestigious U.S. Women In Toys Wonder Woman’ Award in the Designer/Inventor category–Fellow nominees included executives at major corporations, such as Disney, Mattel, Lego, and Hasbro.
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The core principle and objective of Dr. Bashi™ is to empower children of all backgrounds, foster a love of reading among young children, and endear them to their mother-tongue, by promoting and spreading the benefits of multilingualism, and the joy of learning and culture through great diverse books, sustainable, original and artistically exciting products.
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The name of Dr. Bashi™ is a playful transnational feminist homage to the Great American Children's Author and Illustrator Dr. Seuss, who curiously enough wasn't a Ph.D. or M.D. ;-)
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Built on a foundation of love for progressive education and social justice here at Dr. Bashi™ we thrive on our commitment to making learning a fun, beautiful, empowering, and enduring experience. We believe all children deserve to be realistically and positively represented in media, to be able to own/borrow/gift beautiful quality books that reaffirm their reality in positive and empowering stories.
Since the foundation of our social impact startup in 2013, we have strived to independently and ethically empower children and help provide sustainable world-class tools to learn and develop an affinity for our precious and fragile world. And we are dedicated, right in the heart of Empire, in decolonizing contemporary children's literature and mass-media about under-represented, mis-represented, erased, or at best orientalizated children (whether in English or in our other working languages).
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All our children's book undergo a vigorous academic peer-review process where they are assessed by world-renowned scholars, experts and artists, ensuring our manuscripts and illustrations are truthful in every aspect of the letter to their specific locale and subject matters (whether geography, race, gender, class consciousness or marine biology).
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Every aspect of our limited edition wood block designs (no longer in production) were carried out with the unparalleled mastery of Kourosh Beigpour over Perso-Arabic typography and design, the utmost care for the environment, love for children, years of Golbarg Bashi's scholarship and reflections on comparative children’s literature, mass-media, Persian and Arabic language and pedagogy, and personal insight as a Mom in the trenches.
For four years, the founder of Dr. Bashi™ offered free weekly Persian Bilingual Storytime for children & their families in an independent children's bookstore on Columbia University campus but to our collective regret, Persian Storytime had to cease for the New York community after a persistent book banning campaign targeted the author/publisher and the bookstore after the launch of our first social justice diverse children's book P is for Palestine (legal report about the latter can be accessed here).
