Art © Nishant Jain, 2021. Used by permission of the artist
Welcome to the official website and blog of Uma Krishnaswami, writer and author of children's books, Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award nominee, 2020 and 2021. For over twenty-five years, Uma has written picture books, chapter books, early readers, short stories, retold story collections, and novels for young readers. She has spoken to audiences in the US, Canada, India, Singapore, and Hong Kong. Uma's books have been translated into eleven languages. She is published by Atheneum, Groundwood Books, Lee & Low, Dundurn Press, Scholastic India, and Tulika Books (India). From 2006-2020, Uma taught writing in the low-residency MFA program in Writing for Children and Young Adults, Vermont College of Fine Arts, where she is now faculty emerita. Born in India, Uma lives and writes in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.
Represented by Ginger Knowlton of Curtis Brown, Ltd. For school and conference bookings, please visit The Booking Biz.
Photo © S. Shrikhande
Featured Books
Recent Blog Posts
[Posted by Jen Breach]
[Jen] When I saw that Caroline Kusin Pritchard and Sidura Ludwig, two generous and insightful writers, had books coming out within months of each other, I pounced at the chance to turn an interview post into a conversation.
Caroline, Where is Poppy? (illustrated by Dana Wulfekotte) is based on your beloved grandfather, who has passed, and his Passover seder table. And Sidura, you make challah every week for Shabbat, just like the characters in Rising (illustrated by Sophia Vincent Guy). How did you turn these tender family traditions into picture books that intertwine family and religion?
How is it that growing up in India, I never heard of the woman at the center of Anita Kharbanda’s Lioness of Punjab? In accounts of the Emperor Aurangzeb’s siege of the Anandpur Sahib gurdwara, her name was curiously missing, just another example of the erasure of women in 19th and 20th century accounts of the past.
Mai Bhago lived in the 18th century, refusing to fit the mold of a domesticated woman. Instead, she mastered the arts of war and took up arms against the Mughal Empire.
On the day after Earth Day, you will forgive me for turning away from looming calamities of plastic and fires and floods and for writing instead about a book in which a baby turtle swims out to sea and encounters marine life from playful to scary. This is Little Turtle’s Book of the Blue by Yuval Zommer. Verbs in the text invite the youngest listeners to drift along through the lively, light-drenched illustrations, from sunshine to nighttime. Little turtle swims…plays… scuttles… swishes…watches…and more on this undersea adventure!
Posted by Jen Breach
In an interview with Caroline Richmond at We Need Diverse Books on the 2021 release of her picture book biography of Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei, author Joanna Ho said, “When you boil down so much of political activism, it often comes down to inviting people to recognize humanity in others and treat people accordingly.” In those terms, Joanna’s newest book We Who Produce Pearls, illustrated by muralist Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya, is a warm and assured invitation to readers to challenge the dominant white-centered version of history that has held sway since the founding of the United States.
In Uma Krishnaswami’s own words on her book Out of the Way! Out of the Way! (Groundwood, 2010), after many drafts of editorial interference were tossed aside that had insisted the story be more plot-based, more in line with mainstream US children’s publishing: “I told the story the way it showed up in my mind, with a long timeline, a single action taken by one young boy, and the place itself as the center of the tale. It became a story about a child in a community, about the power of a single action unleashing a long spiral of consequences. It relies on repetition, on rhythm, on auditory effect, as much as it does on the beautiful illustrations of my almost-namesake, artist Uma Krishnaswamy from Chennai.”
Happy coincidence, or inspired planning? On April 2, Groundwood Books will publish two picture books set in India: my Look! Look! of which some more here and still more to come, and When I Visited Grandma by Saumiya Balasubramaniam. Since our books share a publisher and a book release date, I thought I’d ask Saumiya to write a guest post about the making of this book.
[Posted by Jen Breach for Writing With a Broken Tusk]
Martha Brockenbrough is a writer of very considerable brain. An example: her acknowledgements for Future Tense: How We Made Artificial Intelligence–and How it Will Change Everything (out today from Feiwel & Friends) are couched in a conversation with ChatGPT, in which Martha teaches the AI exactly how many people it takes to make a book. “‘Given all the work that goes into a book,’” she asks it, “‘and all the human beings required to do that work, do you still think [a book can be written] in six months to a year?’ ChatGPT was silent for a long time. And then this reply appeared, in red type: ‘An error occurred. If the issue persists, please contact us through our help center.’”
This blog began in 2006 as an exercise, a discipline, a meditation for me, a way to think out loud while I was trying to think on the page in my books for young readers. Over the years it has taken on its own trajectory and become a record of sorts—a patchwork quilt of my reflections on crossing borders of all kinds as they relate to writing and teaching. It has come to include the reflections and opinions of others who create books for children and young adults.
In 2024-25, I’ll have 4 new books out, each with its own timeline of edits, copyedits, and a series of proofs, and I am not getting any swifter. Spent years multitasking and living to the thrill of the looming deadline. Can’t do that any more. So rather than shut the blog down and retreat for months on end, I’ve decided to get help.
Today Jen talks to Barry Wittenstein about his narrative nonfiction picture book The Day the River Caught Fire: How the Cuyahoga River Exploded and Ignited the Earth Day Movement, illustrated by Jessie Hartland.