Mophead: How Your Difference Makes a Difference

At school, Selina is teased for her big, frizzy hair. Kids call her 'mophead.' She ties her hair up this way and that way and tries to fit in. Until one day--Sam Hunt plays a role--Selina gives up the game. She decides to let her hair out, to embrace her difference, to be WILD Selina takes us through special moments in her extraordinary life. She becomes one of the first Pasifika women to hold a PhD. She reads for the Queen of England and Samoan royalty. She meets Barack Obama. And then she is named the New Zealand Poet Laureate. She picks up her special tokotoko, and notices something. It has wild hair coming out the end. It looks like a mop. A kid on the Waiheke ferry teases her about it. So she tells him a story . . . This is an inspirational graphic memoir, full of wry humour, that will appeal to young readers and adults alike. Illustrated with wit and verve by the author--NZ's bestselling Poet Laureate--Mophead tells the true story of a New Zealand woman realising how her difference can make a difference.

Author: Selina Tusitala Marsh
Publisher: Auckland University Press
Published: 11/12/2020
Pages: 88
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.09lbs
Size: 9.54h x 7.42w x 0.67d
ISBN: 9781869408985
Audience: Ages 9-12

About the Author
Dr Selina Tusitala Marsh is of Samoan, Tuvaluan, English, and French descent. She was the first Pacific Islander to graduate with a PhD in English from The University of Auckland and is now a lecturer in the English Department, specialising in Pasifika literature. Her first collection, the bestselling Fast Talking PI, won the NZSA Jessie Mackay Award for Best First Book of Poetry in 2010. Marsh represented Tuvalu at the London Olympics Poetry Parnassus event in 2012; her work has been translated into Ukrainian and Spanish, and has appeared in numerous forms live in schools, museums, parks, billboards, and print and online literary journals. As Commonwealth Poet (2016), she composed and performed for the Queen at Westminster Abbey. She became New Zealand's Poet Laureate in 2017.