[Posted by Jen Breach for Writing With a Broken Tusk]

I was utterly moved by Rina Singh’s 2020 picture book biography 111 Trees, which profiled Shyam Sundar Paliwal, an Indian village leader and eco-feminist who, with trees and compassion, replenished the villages water and food supplies, and established equal rights to education for girls. Rina followed that up in 2023 with two more moving and meticulously researched profiles of Indian feminist and conversation activists. I am thrilled to talk with her about her process. 

For those intrigued by offbeat days dedicated to strange pursuits, December 8 is Pretend to be a Time Traveler Day. By whom this was first declared, and why, remain unclear, but let’s celebrate here by considering Erin Entrada Kelly’s middle grade novel, The First State of Being.

It takes a visitor from the future for the protagonist, 12-year-old Michael Rosario, to find himself. The novel raises questions about what it means to be human and to live in a particular time and place, and about how history is fashioned and shaped out of the lives of people.

When I talked about Two at the Top: A Shared Dream of Everest at the Fort Collins Book Fest earlier this year, I mentioned that the book began its life as a collection of twenty-two poems about Mount Everest, of which only one, a poem in two voices, made it into the final picture book. I showed my middle grade audience some slides with a couple of the other poems, whose content became transformed into two spreads of back matter. And I showed them a couple more that didn't even make it that far.

“Will you do anything with those unused poems?” Amy Holzworth, Children’s Services Librarian at Council Tree Library, asked me. I said, “I don’t know. Probably not. I don’t think there’s another book in there.”

I met Alice Curry years ago when I brainstormed with a group of talented writers and storytellers with the objective of designing a MOOC on Coursera with a focus on writing for children. It was a fascinating process. Among all the other ripples those early conversations generated was the remarkable growth of a publishing house under Alice’s leadership. This year Lantana Publishing celebrated its 10th birthday. Here’s my conversation with Alice about this uncommon milestone.

Today the US election is hurtling along to its conclusion. Over the last year, we’ve seen a most peculiar alliance take shape between a man with extreme views who adores the internal combustion engine and another, views equally extreme, who founded a company that revolutionized electric cars. It seems like a good time to see what all this means for children’s books, the little industry that could, the focus of this blog.

Almost 30 years ago, in 1996, GM produced a children’s book meant to educate kids about EVs. Daniel and his parents are shopping for a new car. Here’s a snippet of the text.

How often does a children’s writer get the chance to step onto history’s pathway? I met Rajani LaRocca at Kindling Words five years and an emotional/existential eon ago. I’ve been thrilled to follow her work and successes. In the light of next week’s historic US election, whose outcome is certain to change the world, I invited Rajani to tell me about the Little Golden Book she’s written about Kamala Harris. 

Once in a while, you come across a writer with a big idea—an idea in search of the words it needs for its telling. That was Monique Duncan when she took the picture book intensive semester with me at VCFA. She’d written that idea out, using a many words and plenty of compassion, all of it held aloft by a ton of historical research. Once in a while, you see a project like that settle into a pure, clear distillation of its early self. You see it combined with art that lifts the text so that the book becomes more than the sum of its parts.

Which is why I’m overjoyed to welcome Monique Duncan to this blog, as she writes about the history and personal experience that inspired her picture book, Freedom Braids, illustrated by Oboh Moses and published by Lantana Publishing.