Book

COOL: Women Leaders Reversing Global Warming, was created with her then-12-year-old granddaughter, Avery Sangster. As the first book to feature women leaders of climate action around the world, COOL demonstrates that women are particularly effective in this realm. The book includes women in academia, government, nonprofits, and corporations in the United States, Canada, the UK, Sweden, Denmark, Tanzania, Australia, Sri Lanka, India, and Hong Kong. They are working in categories as diverse as solar installation---and bicycle super highways. Each chapter ends with action steps that readers can take. One hundred percent of the authors’ royalties go to the Women’s Earth Alliance as seed money for women in 20 countries to launch organizations that aim to reverse global warming. The authors will plant a tree for every copy of the book that’s sold.

Paola’s sixth book, Wonder Girls: Changing Our World was created with her then-eleven-year-old granddaughter co-author, Alex Sangster, and released in October 2017. It is the first book to document the work of groups of activist girls around the world. All 15 groups include girls age 10 to 18, tackling diverse issues in 13 countries. The book has won literary awards in categories as diverse as Women’s Studies, Multicultural Nonfiction and, most recently, a Gold in the Social Justice category of the Nautilus Book Awards. Elisabeth Sandmann Verlag, Munich, released the German edition of Wonder Girls in October 2019.

Her fifth book, Grandmother Power, A Global Phenomenon (powerHouse Books, 2012), documents a new, unheralded international women’s movement. Grandmother Power features 120 activist grandmothers in 17 grandmother groups in 15 countries on five continents who are fighting courageously and effectively—against poverty, disease, illiteracy, and human rights abuse—to create a better world for grandchildren everywhere. Grandmother Power has won the 2013 Living Now Book Award's Gold medal -- Social Action category, Foreword Reviews' 2012 Book of the Year Gold Award -- Women's Studies category, 2013 About.com Readers' Choice Award for Favorite Grandparenting Book, and the 2013 International Book Award for Multicultural Nonfiction

Women Who Light the Dark, was released in 2007. It features women in 15 countries who are helping each other with the intractable problems that make life dark for families everywhere.

Paola’s third photographic book, ¡Viva Colores! A Salute to the Indomitable People of Guatemala was published in September 2006; its bi-lingual, English/Spanish text was written by David Hill.

Her second book, Celebrating Women (2004) features festivals in 15 countries that celebrate women’s accomplishments, attributes, roles, rites of passage, and spiritual lives. The first exhibit ever curated by the International Museum of Women (San Francisco) was Celebrating Women. A travelling exhibit was mounted by the Field Museum in Chicago, where 195,000 visitors saw it during seven months in 2008. UNESCO exhibited Celebrating Women in March 2009 at its world headquarters in Paris. The show travelled to six U.S. venues in 2010 and 2011.

Paola conceived and, collaborating with Toby Tuttle, was co-author/photographer of In Her Hands, Craftswomen Changing the World, (hardcover, 2000; paperback, 2004). This book features women artisans in 12 countries, all sending their children to school with the money they earn from selling their handicrafts. Photographs from this book have been exhibited at The United Nations in New York; The United States Senate, Washington DC; The Smithsonian Museum Folklife Festival, Washington DC and The Field Museum, Chicago.