The Diverse Bookshelf

I feel like it’s important for young readers to see themselves in books, but also to see others in books. You know there’s a lot of talk about books being mirrors and windows and I definitely believe that. Our society is multicultural. There’s so many different backgrounds of every kind, different abilities, different thought processes.

The value in seeing yourself is understanding that there is not necessarily an ideal that you need to look toward, but to know that you’re already ideal as you are. But also whenever you read about people who are outside of your experience the ability to build empathy and understanding of where other people come from and what other people are experiencing, because we all live in these bubbles, right, and it’s important for us to be able to peek inside someone else’s bubble if we can, because that’s how we become a more compassionate society.

And you know there’s a lot of studies that show readers tend to be more empathetic and that books help build empathy. And I mean what’s more important than that.

The first time I recall seeing an Asian character in a book was again Judy Blume. She had a book Just as Long as We’re Together and one of the characters, she wasn’t the main character, but she was one of the three best friends and she was an Asian character.

And I remember being fascinated by that because it wasn’t something that I had come across before. And, you know, another thing I like to tell young people is when I was growing up all the stories that I wrote for myself all had White girl characters and a lot of times they had blonde hair or they certainly weren’t a part of any marginalized community.

And one of the great things about this year’s Newbery honorees is that they’re all people of color. And the great thing is that young people today more and more will be able to see themselves in books and whenever they sit down to write when they’re eight years old like I was they’ll write characters that look like them because they’ll know that their stories are valid.

It never even occurred to me, even into adulthood to have a story with a Filipino character until I wrote Blackbird Fly, which was my first book. And that’s really sad, you know when you think about it. So I’m happy to be writing at a time right now where there’s more and more of those stories available so that people know that their stories are valuable and that they need to be heard.

A lot of my books are inspired by my mother. And she is from the Philippines and she loves to tell stories. She’s a very devout Catholic, so I grew up listening to a lot of stories about saints. And she would share these stories with such passion and an underlying morality of course and life lessons that they had offered and that very much informed specifically Hello Universe a character of Lola, the grandmother, and her use of folktales to impart her wisdom on Virgil.

And in my other books as well it’s very much mirroring my growing up and hearing, you know, I don’t speak Tagalog or any of the dialects, but of course I grew up hearing words peppered here and there. And so that’s incorporated in the books and also things of food, which is integral to any culture, also prevalent in the books. So, you know, it’s very much a reflection of the things I heard, felt, saw growing up.

I actually went to Manila for the readers and writers festival and it was my first trip back to the Philippines since my first book Blackbird Fly was published in 2015 and I was able to visit schools in Manila. And there’s this sense of nervousness at first because I’ve spoken to kids all across America and I’ve heard from Filipino American families, parents, readers, and it’s been really overwhelming. But there’s always that question I wonder how Filipinos will react or embrace books or relate.

And one thing that I’ve absolutely learned as a writer is that when you’re writing about real life, real emotions, feelings of loneliness, not fitting in and otherness, pretty much anyone can relate to, at least you hope they do, and it seems as if they do, because no matter the background we’ve all experienced what that’s like.

So I went to Manila and I spoke to the schools there. Of course everyone was excited and enthusiastic and so appreciative of Filipinos being depicted in literature and celebrating Filipino American culture.

Drawn Together is a very special book for, for me. And it came based on my experience with my own family. My family is originally from Vietnam, but I was born in the U.S. And growing up, my grandparents spoke mostly Vietnamese and I spoke mostly English, so I spent a lot of time at their house, in their home, and we loved each other so much, and yet we didn’t know how to talk to each other about that. 

So I grew up with this dissonance of both feeling very close to my grandparents, but also feeling very distant at the same time because we didn’t know how to communicate on a very basic level. I wanted to write a book that both captured that depth of love and connection while also recognizing some of the challenges that could come with it. 

What I didn’t know at the time is that Dan had the same experience with his grandmother because she lived in Thailand and spoke mostly Thai, or maybe exclusively Thai, and so he had that same language barrier, and had to find ways to try and connect with her over time. 

So that story is very personal to me. And it’s been wonderful to share with people because, as a writer, and all till – until this book came out pretty much, that inability to communicate felt like this personal failure and burden that I was carrying, but having the book out in the world has given me the opportunity to connect with other people who have had similar experiences because I’ll go to a reading and then inevitably afterwards someone will come up and say, ‘Oh you know, this reminds me so much of my childhood.’ Or, ‘I speak English with my grandparents, but we’re not able to connect just because we can’t find that common ground until we were able to find a mutual love of cooking or music or art.’ 

And so having a book out in the world like that has made me feel less alone. And what’s even more gratifying for me is this is a book about the inability to connect with someone in your life and then seeing classrooms and families use the book as a way of connecting with the people in their lives. 

I’ve had so many people reach out and say, you know, ‘We read this book and we immediately called our grandparents.’ Or ‘We immediately decided we needed to get together with our grandmother who we haven’t talked to in a long time.’ And I’ll get pictures of kids and their grandparents drawing together or painting together. And the fact that this book, which was born out of that distance, is being used to close that gap for other families means the world to me. And I can’t think of a better tribute to my grandparents than, than that.

It’s been a wonderful experience to talk to children and have them talk about how they see themselves reflected in books that I’ve worked on. For me, as an author these books weren’t around when I was a kid. So, I didn’t see myself in a book truly until after I graduated from college. I read Gene Yang’s American Born Chinese and I had this like, everything clicked into place. I was like I didn’t know that this was what I was missing until I read this book, that this was even possible to see yourself in this way on the page. 

So, when I talk to children now and they’re seeing themselves through these books, and I’m so grateful that they don’t have to wait as long as I did. But even just this weekend I was at Comic Con and people would come up and say, they held up Green Lantern: Legacy and they were like, ‘You wrote about my grandmother. You wrote about my family.’ And that means so much. And with Drawn Together I’m always getting messages from families who see their experience reflected on the page in a way that they hadn’t before, and that means the world to me.

My boys love, love, love the book, and they take a lot of pride in it getting to see a character as a superhero who’s also a Vietnamese, a Vietnamese boy. One of the fun parts about working on the story is when I started doing, writing the Green Lantern story, I wanted to make sure that this character, even though they were new, fit within the Green Lantern universe. So, I emailed my editor, and I was like, could you send me some of the back matter so I can read and research and make sure that what I’m writing is consistent? 

And they sent me boxes of like all the Green Lantern back copies. So, my boys and I just spent like a summer just reading everything. I was like I don’t know how this happened, but I am getting paid to read comics, so I’m just living the dream. So yeah, my boys have gotten a lot out of being in the world of, world of comics for sure.

So my name is Christina Soontornvat. The Tryout, the beginning of it, you know, you see the first day of school for seventh grade. And so you see Christina going through all of these different classes and the teachers in every class are mispronouncing her or my name are making a little joke about it or saying, I’m not even going to try to pronounce that one. And what I wanted to do with that is show readers right away. First of all, give them a sense of the time period. I think this would be hopefully less acceptable now to treat students like this. Though I know it happens all the time. And also just showing that I was different. I had always had a name that stood out and that people made comments about, but also that for each of those teachers, they thought they were making a funny joke.

And that was the only time that happened to them that day. But I had seven classes that day and it happened every single class. So I think you’d kind of get to see that, okay, these little microaggressions, which is what sometimes they get called, they add up and they accumulate. So it was a good way in the graphic novel to show that. And then you see a flashback where my third grade teacher approaches it very differently. I’m going to try to say your name and I’m sorry if I don’t get it right, but I really want to try. And that was also a way to show that there were people in this small town who were just so inclusive, so kind, so open. And she, I’m going to guarantee I’m the first Thai person she ever met, and that was the first Thai name she ever tried to pronounce. But just how much you can impact someone and make a difference in their life by being kind to them. And that also happened all the time too. So really the book as there was a lot that was challenging. There was a lot of racism, prejudice in the school. But I also really wanted to show how much kindness there was because there’s that too. And that’s the totality of the story, is that all of that existed together.

For more author interviews, please visit ReadingRockets.org.

Dallas is such a diverse city. And of course there were lots of Thai people that we hung out with. My dad had a lot of Thai friends who lived there. And then so moving to a smaller town where it wasn’t as diverse. And I think my school, I went back and looked and I think it was like 87% white demographic. And so feeling instantly unique, very different. Teased sometimes, but just less being ostracized, but more just constantly being aware that I was different and feeling like I didn’t exactly have things in common with my classmates. I think that made me, I think that’s one of the reasons I was such a big reader. I mean, for one thing, I was always at the restaurant. I was always hanging out with my parents there. I had to go there after school. I had to hang out there on the weekends.

I’m an only child, and so that I couldn’t be left home alone. I had to go with them. And this is before iPads, before internet. So if I wasn’t drawing, I was reading or I would be asked to help out. So if I didn’t want to be put to work, I would have to just sit in the corner with a book. But I also think that there was a little bit of escapism where I was trying to imagine myself as the hero, imagine myself in these fantasy worlds. I read a lot of fantasy as a kid, a lot of magical stories. And I think it was because I felt so different in the real world. I was looking for a place for myself, and I found that in books.

For more author interviews, please visit ReadingRockets.org.

Being honest and kind of raw about racism and prejudice in our country is really the, it’s like the only way to approach it from all sides, every angle. And I think the important thing for people to know is that kids, young kids in schools today, no matter who they are or where they are very aware. They know about racism, they see it. They … it’s happened to them or to people that they know. They want to talk about it. They are not afraid to talk about it. I think it’s us grownups that get afraid to talk about it, like uncomfortable. We’ve been taught that it’s uncomfortable to talk about, but we’re not going to make any change or any progress if we don’t talk about it. And I think kids are, they are so much more sophisticated, mature, capable of grappling with nuance, nuance of feeling, with empathy than we give them credit for. I just think we do them so much disservice to try to pare things down or cut things out, or hide things from them. You really can’t hide things from them. I mean, think about yourself in middle school and high school. You knew what was up even if nobody was telling you, you knew what was going on.

For more author interviews, please visit ReadingRockets.org.

When I was watching the mainstream media cover the story, there were just so many times where I noticed the American media kind of misrepresenting something or not getting it. Just so many examples, not understanding the religion, making fun, a little bit of the way that families would leave offerings and pray to this princess, this goddess of the cave. Guess goddess is not the right word, but her spirit, and just not being as respectful as they could. But also other things like the way that the boys responded when the rescue divers came in to help them, and how the boys were very calm and not seeming to get upset. And so the American media kind of acted like, oh, these funny boys, they weren’t even upset about anything because they were smiling. And I just, that was a misunderstanding of Thai culture, which is that you, they’re trying to be respectful by not showing they’re upset, and of course they’re upset, and of course they’re so terrified and overwhelmed and emotional, but they’re not going to show that to British diver because it’s not appropriate, and that would reflect badly on them, so it’s on them and their family.

So it was things like that that I felt like, okay, oh, when I write this, I have so much to say that’s going to help you understand it. If you don’t know what Thai culture is like that I felt just had to go in there. That’s part of understanding the story just as much as knowing the facts, the facts about the rescue.

For more author interviews, please visit ReadingRockets.org.

As Korean-American, as an Asian-American, I do want to address how librarians and educators and teachers can choose strong book examples about Asian American, Pacific Islander history, literature, fiction, characters, and voices in a way that is equitable and also authentic. I think the only answer I can think of is do the homework and be accountable.

When I say be accountable and do the homework in terms of trying to find the most authentic and proper books to teach that feature Asian American, Pacific Islander characters, themes, and historical events, it’s not just about going to the award list. Oh, what made all the state lists, what made all the awards lists, you know, let me just do that because I was that kind of reader.

Every time the National Book Awards came out or the Pulitzers, I’m like I would just go and get all the books and read them. But that’s not enough. You need to dig beneath that because there are a lot of books that go missing that should have been on those award lists but didn’t have the distribution, you know. Because a lot of these books are being published by more smaller, independent bookstores, they don’t have the access or the money to get them on all the bookshelves at the major bookstores. So that’s one thing.

I also think there are a bunch of websites now that are devoted to helping teachers and librarians know how to just get through this mass of this forest of books, like how do you focus in. There’s We Need Diverse Books.

Linda Sue Park, award-winning Korean American author, she just started a specific resource for Korean and Korean-American and Koreans in the diaspora list of books with interviews and vetting of “here are some really authentic books you should be reading.”

I’m Korean American. I was born in America, and I actually did live in Korea for a few years. I was born in Virginia, and I grew up mostly in Connecticut on the East Coast. And I lived in Korea from 1977 to ’82, and I went to Seoul Foreign School, which was a school for American kids. And it was really interesting because growing up as a Korean American in a mostly white suburban town in Connecticut, I got, unfortunately, I got, you know, the slanted eye thing, kids calling me terrible racist slurs, and I used to get a lot of “Can you see when you’re smiling?” kind of questions, which made me very self-conscious about my eyes.

And it was interesting because when we moved to Seoul, Korea, suddenly I was surrounded by everyone who looked like me, but because I talked the way I talk and I don’t speak Korean – I was raised to speak English and I’m very American, the way I behaved and my body language, the way I talked, and I spoke very little Korean – I was trying to learn it as a kid – the Korean kids who looked just like me, they made fun of me too, and they didn’t consider me Korean.

And I would find out later there’s a Korean term called “gyopo” which means Koreans who are not born in Korea, and it can sometimes be a little bit of a problematic term because you’re not really considered really Korean. So, I kind of grew up not fitting into either world. I didn’t fit in in my country of heritage, and I didn’t fit in in my other country of heritage. [laughs]

When I wrote my three children’s book picture book biographies, Sixteen Years in Sixteen Seconds, the Sammy Lee Story; Shining Star, the Anna May Wong Story; and Twenty-two Cents, Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank, I chose those three people because of their resilience.

Sammy Lee faced great racism. He was not allowed to swim in the town public swimming pool because he wasn’t white, you know, and this is in Pasadena. Do you know how hot Pasadena gets in the summer? It’s three digits. It’s like a hundred degrees out there. This child needs relief from the hot heatwaves, the sun, and he has to be behind a fence. He can’t use the pool ’cause he’s not white. That’s unforgivable. That’s disgusting. It’s hateful. It’s wrong.

What did he do? Ended up becoming a doctor, ended up winning two, not just one, two gold medals for America at the Olympics in diving. You know, that’s resilience. That’s saying I see the best in my country, and I’m going to go towards that, you know, I’m not going to let the hate defeat my dreams. With Anna May Wong, same thing, faced great racism as an actress, you know, did not get a lot of roles because she was not white, you know, had to do stereotype roles like “Mongol slave number four.”

She was hashtag representation matters decades before Twitter and social media even came about.

It’s amazing how she overcame the racism in Hollywood to fight for more dignified roles in Hollywood. And it’s because of Anna May Wong that we have things like the blockbuster megahit Shang-Chi from Marvel, you know, why we have Crazy Rich Asians, why we have Parasite and Minari, two Korean and Korean-American movies back to back at the Oscars.

You know, we owe a lot of that fight in Hollywood because she fought for the importance of positive imagery on the screen. That’s resilience. She didn’t give up. She kept going to those auditions even though she knew she probably would not get the role. Muhammad Yunus grew up, he came from a well-off family, but they were surrounded by poverty, and he watched his mother, they were making a favorite family snack, she would give them instead to the kids. He would say all the kids would tell the mom go for it, give it to the poor people outside, the homeless.

And he was so inspired by his mother’s compassion for the homeless and the poverty stricken in Bangladesh, that would lead to him studying economics and coming up with the brilliant idea of using micro banking where you give very small loans to poverty stricken people so they can actually be enabled and empowered to rise above .

You can’t break the cycle of poverty if you’re not given the same level playing field of getting a fair loan to start your business so you can become economically independent. So, he was resilient. He was a Boy Scout. The Boy Scouts taught him about compassion and giving back to the world. So, that is how and why I choose the subjects for my young adult and children’s book biographies.

I always look for people that are resilient and fight back and enact positive change because that, I think, reading about that inspires and empowers young kids to know that you can do something, you know, you can protest, you can talk to your principal about something that is bothering you at your school. You can speak up and protect your friends against bullying, you know, and so forth. So, to me, that’s why I write the biographies that I do, especially for children’s books. I look for kids that are just strong and resilient and fight back.

My very first book, The Ugly Vegetables, is a story about a girl and her mother. Her mother grows Chinese vegetables in her garden while everybody else in the neighborhood grows flowers. And the little girl is very embarrassed because they’re obviously Chinese-American or Asian-American in the story. This is very much based on my childhood. I think one of the things when I wrote my first story was to write what you know. Following those old mantras, write what you know.

After I wrote this book, it was actually a relative success. I was really, really proud of it. But what happened was I started getting letters, or parents who say “Oh I’ve been looking so hard for a book just like this. An Asian-American character where there is somebody who looks just like my daughter. Or just like my son.” Then I started thinking about myself, and I started thinking about how I grew up. I remembered how I used to feel very much alone because I grew up in upstate New York where there was not a lot of Asians, the fact we were the only Asian family in our neighborhood, I was definitely the only Asian girl in my classroom. Most of the time I just forgot about it, most of the time I just pretended I wasn’t Asian. In fact I remember walking past a window and I would see my reflection in the window and I would go “Oh, there’s a Chinese girl.” I’d be like “Oh wait, that’s me.”

Because most of the time I would just forget that I was Asian. So, I think one of the reasons I did that was because I loved books when I was younger. And all the books that I read never had anybody that looked like me in them. And I realized that if that had been maybe I wouldn’t have felt so alone. I wouldn’t have wanted to forget I was Asian so much. And so that’s something that is a mirror, these books are very much a mirror of my life when I was younger.

And as a window, I hope as a window, when I was younger, I tell this story quite often. As I said, I always tried to pretend that I wasn’t Asian, I’d always try to forget that I was Asian. Most of the time that worked. Most of the time, I just forget that I was. I thought I was just like everybody in my classroom. And then my fifth grade class decided to put on the play “The Wizard of Oz”. And everybody, all the girls in my class wanted to be Dorothy. And I really wanted to be Dorothy too. So, every day, out on the school-yard, we’d all sing “Somewhere over the Rainbow” over and over and over practicing for the audition.

Finally on the day of the audition. We are standing in that circle, one last time, practicing. And I turned to the girl next to me and I said “Hey today’s the audition, do you think they might choose me to be Dorothy” And she looked at me and she said “But you can’t be Dorothy. Dorothy’s not Chinese.” And I remembered I felt so stupid. And I remember feeling like oh my gosh she’s right, I’m Asian, I’m Chinese. There’s no way I could ever be Dorothy. And when it was time for the audition and they called me name, I didn’t even try out. I just shook my head and said “No, no, no. Forget it. It would be so stupid for Dorothy to be Chinese.”

So my hope for my books is not only is it a mirror of my childhood so that kids who were like me could see themselves and not feel so alone. I also hope that it’s a window for those who are not Asian who are not of a minority race. And they can see other, other races and realize oh they are just like, just like, even though they might look different. So that’s kind of how I feel my books are both windows and mirrors.

So I had had my third child. I’d been a stay-at-home mom, and, like, I had gotten an invitation to a high school reunion, and, you know, you get those things and it kinda makes you stop and think, and for that one, I thought, “You know, what have I not done that I always wanted to do?” And I realized I always wanted to write — try to write a children’s book, and so I called up a friend of mine who had an MFA, and I said, “Well, you know, what should I do?” And she said, “Go to the Writers Center in Maryland. They have, you know, great programs,” and so I took my first class with Mary Quattlebaum, who’s a really awesome teacher, and it just kinda took off from there.

I think, you know, the hard part about being a mom when you’re a writer is you kind of sometimes have this instinct to protect your characters, and that’s really the last thing you wanna do. You really kind of wanna make their lives as difficult as you reasonably can for the sake of the story. I think having kids has been helpful in that you kind of have a sense of, you know, what a kid’s life is like now, which is different from, you know, what my life was when I was growing up.

But at the same time, I try to respect their space. Like, I don’t want them to feel like, “Oh, this happened, and it’s gonna end up in Mom’s book.” So there’s always kinda that line, or at least, you know, you have to ask permission. Like, is it okay if I put this, you know, fill in embarrassing incident in this book?

Well, you know, I grew up as an outsider, because I grew up in an Afro-American neighborhood, and I went to school in Chinatown. And so even though I had friends in both areas, I was always something of an outsider. In my own neighborhood, if we were playing war games – and, again, this will date me – I would serve as the all-purpose Oriental. I’d either be the Japanese that was getting killed, if we’re fighting World War II, or I’d be the Korean getting killed if we were fighting the Korean War.

Or, when I would go into Chinatown – well, I went to a Catholic school. And so if my friends wanted to tell jokes that the nuns wouldn’t understand, my friends would tell the jokes in Chinese. But my parents didn’t speak Chinese at home, so I didn’t have enough Chinese to understand the jokes.

All of my favorite books were, for me, exotic stories. I would include in that something like A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. I was a Midwestern, suburban girl. I lived in a small town near cornfields, and Brooklyn was exotic to me. It was this big city, which I had never lived in, and Francie Nolan lived in this tenement, which was a very different setting for me. And, yet, she loved the library, and she loved to read. So, finding something in common with people who lived in very different circumstances was by far the most rewarding thing for me.

And I think that’s what books can do for young people. They’re a bridge. They’re a way to get to know people who are very different and to say, “But wait. In a lot of ways, they are like me.”

It wasn’t until I was grown and had children of my own that I realized, “Oh, there’s probably just a treasure trove of stories in my own family that I’ve never looked into.”

Some young people may come to that much sooner than I did, and they may well be interested in, “Grandma,” or, “Grandpa, tell me about when you were young.” “How was it different in whatever country you lived in?” And if that’s the case, wonderful. Write them down. Oftentimes, it’s grandma and grandpa, or even your parents who can’t write in English, or can’t speak in English, and can’t share those stories in the way that you can. You can help, even if it’s only writing down a story or two of your grandparents that you then just show to the rest of your family.

So Tracy Woo in Blubber was the first character that I really saw myself in when I was growing up because finally instead of Mr. Sulu or, you know, Bruce Lee, I actually saw a character who was my generation and who had very similar experiences to mine, and I think it filled a need I didn’t even know I had to see myself there.

Books are entirely about empathy. They are a way of diving into someone else’s mind and heart, whether it’s the mind and heart of the author or the mind and heart of the characters or both. And I think that the more you experience the world through someone else’s perspective, the more you see that there are, you know, these beautiful diverse perspectives in our world and that they inform us and they enlighten and us and they educate us. 

And I think that the more we read and the more widely we read, the more diverse authors we read, the more we understand the world. And to me that’s a really powerful aspect of literature that it can create empathy in us in a way that’s really safe where we’re not always able to go out in the world and meet people who are having wildly different experiences than we are, especially if those experiences have to do with racism or sexism or homophobia or transphobia or ableism. Right?

Like we don’t necessarily want to experience those things in real life or want our children to experience those things in real life. But they’re so much a part of our world and so much the underpinning of so many structures in our society that reading about them and understanding them and seeing them on page is a safe way to experience some of the scary and dangerous and difficult things about the world around us.

I’m often speaking in schools that are in wealthy communities that can afford to bring authors, so there’s a limitation to the audience that I’m able to present to regularly. I don’t get to present to, you know, schools in low-income communities as often as I would like to or schools in Black communities as often as I would like to.

So I’m often speaking to an audience that is very different from the characters in my books. And so, you know, they often are experiencing the things that I write about, like contemporary struggles around civil rights, contemporary struggles around police brutality and social justice and equality and things like that feel like something they study in history class in relation to the Civil Rights movement not something that’s part of their world right now.

And so I find that young people respond in a lot of different ways to the work. They are excited about the story. I often am hearing questions about my characters much more often than I’m hearing questions about how we change the world at large. Right? The power of fiction is that you’re drawn into who these people are, you’re drawn into their experience. You’re drawn into the world that they operate in.

So in something like How it Went Down where there’s all these different perspectives, you know, it’s a way of seeing the world through all of these different eyes. And there are a lot of readers who find that really exciting. But, you know, for me as the author it’s just as exciting to hear them rush up and say, well, what happens to so and so after the book is over, you know, that they care about the characters and they’re excited about the story.

I don’t think any of our bookshelves are complete yet. I think that we’re in a moment where we are inviting a lot of voices to publishing, that were not invited before, that were specifically excluded before. And so one of the delights is to see historical fiction opening up, to see Native fiction and Latinx fiction and Black American history reflected in our books in more expansive, deeper ways then we’ve seen in the past.

Our historical cannon has tended to be a little bit about the Revolutionary War, a little bit about the Civil War, maybe a little bit about World War Two and then some Civil Rights thrown in without a lot of exploration of sort of the individual lives and experiences of people who were not white, who were not heroic in the grand way we think of heroes, right? People who changed the world and might have a biography written about them.

It’s just as powerful to read about a young person who stood up for what they believed in in a really difficult time. And so I think we’re seeing a lot more of those kinds of narratives. We’re seeing a lot more narratives that celebrate regular people who stood up for something important. And often those people were non-white, often those people, you know, were marginalized in one way or another.

And so we’re seeing more stories about marginalized people; people who are part of historically marginalized communities being able to tell their story. And for me that just expands our bookshelves enormously.

Patricia: When I started writing a number of years ago, there were very few books for, by and about the African-American experience for children in picture books, beginning readers, novels, fiction or non-fiction: Virginia Hamilton, who was my mentor and… quite helpful; Jim Haskins, who had almost single-handedly documented the stories of African-American musicians; and Walter Dean Myers, whose juvenile novels brought young boys to reading.

So there were some African-American writers out there, but they alone could not represent all the stories that should be told — needed to be told. So when we entered the scene, what we tried to do was to fill a niche.

And our niche was that time period between 1800 and 1900 — that’s pre-Civil War, Civil War, post-Civil War, up through and until the Harlem Renaissance. And we just carved that out as our niche and we worked very, very hard to try to tell that story. And I hope that what we’ve done is to make our history a little bit clearer — something that doesn’t make the children feel ashamed or hurt.

It is not designed to point a finger or to make some child in a classroom feel responsible for all that happened back then, but we can’t shovel it under the rug and say that those things did not happen — they did. But let’s tell it by telling an even-handed, well-researched, well-documented story and that’s what we tried to do in Days of Jubilee, Rebels Against Slavery, and Goin’ Someplace Special. And even the whale men, White Hands, Black…I mean, Black Hands, White Sails.

I decided to illustrate Langston Hughes’ poems because it was a poem I was very interested in for years. And the fact that it’s the first photographic book to win the Coretta Scott King award made me all the more proud, not just for myself but because of all of the photographers that will come later. One of things I mentioned in my speech is about how I learned of the award and I had to think about it for a minute, because I said “well, I only have one book and it was a photographic book and they wouldn’t give it to that.”

So, it really shocked me that, you know, they gave the award the way they did. In talking to many of the people who voted for it or saw it, many of my illustrator friends said “Oh man, you knocked it out of the park on that one. So you shouldn’t be surprised.” So I was very humbled in that regard. The poem itself, it’s only 33 words in total, and a children’s picture book is 32 pages usually, so that’s basically a word per page.

So that’s the first challenge was figuring how to divide it out over 32 pages. Once I figured that out then I started seeing the phrases and then the phrases dictated how I was gonna shoot it. So that made it easy and I think in this day and age of so much white noise and so much going and so much technology and so many things bombarding you at one time, I think it’s good to just take a breath and just kind of step back and be able to look at something that really wastes no words. And allows you know the imagery to shine through it’s just simple language. So I wanted the photographs to shine through in a very simple way.

The people in the book are just my people, regular people. My kids are in there. I work out at a gym and a number of the people work out at the gym with me. The older people that are in there work out in the gym. And they have a vitality to them that I wanted to show. And it was important to me to show you know newborn skin as well wrinkled skin. Because I wanted to show the range, in between the two, I wanted to show the wisdom that’s acquired. I wanted to show the innocence in a newborn smile. I wanted to show skin dark as night. I wanted to show skin bright as honey. You know, I wanted to show the range that is in my people

That old photograph at the end of My People is my father. Mr. Charles R. Smith, Sr., the original. My father unfortunately passed back in 1999, and this was one of my favorite pictures of him because he looks so good. But he was in the Navy, it was his first or second year in the Navy, he was very proud to serve. You know, his friends and everything, so it was my editor who actually said “do you have any old photographs of any old family members that you might want to put in?” And at the time, I didn’t really have any old like quote unquote old photographs. I had regular pictures of older family members and such. But that was one of the few old photographs I had and I always loved looking at it, so I says “Let’s put dad in there. Let’s immortalize him.”

I don’t think that children are stupid, and I don’t think that I need to hold back from what I’m trying to say, and so what I do is tell the story. And I’m a big fan of the story. I don’t think I have to talk down to children. I don’t believe in that, and I don’t think that I have to have a hidden meaning there. I think that my job is to tell the story as clearly as I can, and so writing for children is the same as not writing for children, which is why some of my adult poems that I would’ve considered adult poems have become children’s books without changing a word.

I always felt that it was important to share African-American history because I enjoy it. I find it very interesting and I think that we don’t really get a lot of it in our schooling. I think one of the great ways for me to learn and share is by painting it.

One of the things that I really enjoy about it is that when it comes to the artwork that I do, I’m telling human stories, and they’re essentially human truths. I think that once we’re able to see that — whether it’s represented in artwork that shows African-Americans or other ethnic groups — as long as that essential human truth is there, we’re going to understand it. So that’s what I’m hoping comes across.

Everyone understands these different human emotions that we have. And when you can see it in a piece of artwork, you relate to it. You emotionally respond to it. And that’s what’s going to draw you to it, and that’s where I aim. That’s my aim when I’m creating artwork.

Show Way begins when Soonie’s great-grandma was seven, and she was stolen from Virginia and sent to a plantation in South Carolina without her mom or pop.

I knew about my grandmother Soonie, and I knew about her grandmother, although I didn’t know her name. When my grandmother was getting sick, my family would never tell me stories. They would talk to each other, well you remember when Soonie blah, blah, blah, or Soonie was so mean.

I caught snippets all my life, and I knew this family history sort of, but when my grandmother was getting older and had no great-grandchildren and I had been saying I was going to have a baby forever and I hadn’t yet. She was getting older and she didn’t think she would get any great-grandbabies, she said if you ever do have one, make sure you tell her about Soonie and how those blankets were made, and make sure Aunt Lucinda gives you one of the quilts and I had none of this information. I told her that one day when I had a baby I would like to give it one of the names of my family.

Just tell me everybody’s names — she had 12 brothers and sisters. She started telling me the names which were like Birdie and I’m thinking, my child is not going to be named any of these names. But she told me more and more stories.

She died four months before I got pregnant with Toshi. I knew I wanted to tell the story of the maternal line of the family, so I started writing Show Way and I ended up going back to South Carolina to talk to my aunt who died soon after and to talk to my cousins, to piece together the history of the Underground Railroad and what part the Scotts played in it. That’s how I got to the story and I also wanted to write about how I’m not here accidentally, I’m not sitting here and talking about my writing.

I think there’s always gonna be a gap for young people looking for images of themselves in the literature, and I think, partly, it’s because everything’s changing so quickly. I think at the same time, the essence of childhood doesn’t change.

What young people want are stories that deal with issues of them trying to figure out who they are in the world. They feel isolated, they feel like they’re the only ones like that, that their crazy family is the only crazy family like that, and that their longings are the only longings like that.

I think they’re going to they find their way. I was talking about this yesterday, young people are hungry, and their brains are huge, and they are going to find their way the way we found our way. And I think there’s going to be the literature that helps.

I think there’s always a need for more stories. I get constant emails about why there isn’t more literature targeted at gay/lesbian/transgender youth? Why isn’t there more literature targeted at biracial families?

More literature that’s targeted at single-parent families and parents. Of course, with all the foreclosures, what does it mean to suddenly lose your home and that whole issue of displacement which we weren’t dealing with so much in the ’70s and ’80s and ’90s as we are dealing with now.

How does the shaky ground keep them steady and how do they move with it? I think that there’s always going to be a hunger. They’re always going to have a hunger because that’s what adolescence is, and there’s always going to be a certain sorrow to their existence because they need to live in that world.

You know, I grew up, you know, in terms of my — in terms of the sort of accessibility of the prose and the poetry that I try to write, I remember reading Langston Hughes and Nikki Giovanni and Hakeem and all these amazing poets and learning so much from them; being informed but also being inspired in so many ways by their words.

And that inspiration came from the feeling that their words gave me, but it also came from a place of I was able to understand what they were saying. I was able to get it and relate it to my own life. I’ve tried to write like that. I’ve tried to make my poems and my prose, which are very personal, I’ve tried to make it your business, and I believe that’s so important, especially when we talk about getting young people engaged with reading.

I went through a phase in middle school where I did not like reading. In fact, I loathed it because I was being forced to do it. And I think that books are like amusement parks, and sometimes we have to let the kids choose the rides. And I wasn’t being given that opportunity to ride, to find my groove. And I think I try to write from that vantage point.

I try to write from a vantage point of making sure the work is accessible, commercial, literary. I don’t want to be put in one box, but I need to do all these things that I’ve grown up learning how to do, and I guess inevitably it’s my style, it’s my swag, it’s sort of how I dance on the page, and it works for me. And I think that is the key that I learned from Nikki is that it has to work for you first and you stand a much better chance of it working for the rest of us.

Besides the books being about African-Americans, they are about urban issues. And you’ll find that when you go through books for young people, you don’t find that many books take place in cities. It’s a very strange thing. You find books that take place in suburbia over and over again, but you find very few books that take place in cities. And even on television, you find city living only on cop shows. Everything else is only within the apartment. But in my books there are fences, brick buildings, and fire hydrants. So many kids are attracted to that urban experience.

I get tons of letters from young readers. Many of them relate to the characters and say, ‘I have a similar problem or circumstance.’ They think they relate because the characters are like them. But really I think they’re relating because of the environment. They recognize the environment. They’re drawn to the books because they hear a language they are familiar with. They hear names and circumstances that are familiar things, so the book becomes a friendly place to be. And they write to me and say, ‘Oh we love your books. I’m just like that person. This person reminds me of my cousin.’ That makes me feel good.

There are televisions in restaurants, at the airport, in school, in the smallest place. And even if they’re aren’t, strangers who once talked to one another in bus stations are now swiping or watching or listening. To me that’s not a moral judgment to say we should be cautious.

I don’t fear that we will stop telling stories. We’re finding ways to tell them now, through film, through blogs, through books and poems and music. What I feel is that we’re reaching a place where it becomes difficult to listen to someone else’s story, to stop, to be still. You see it requires stillness and attention. And it makes, you have to quiet your own mind to not want also to interrupt and become self-referential.

The art of conversation, which is one of the things that is in danger, I think, and critical to everything from wooing others, to love, to business dealings, to negotiating conflicts. The art of listening is critical to that. And that means that you have to listen to the other person without thinking the entire time, “This reminds me of this, oh, this happened to me, oh that’s just like,” … and it’s very natural because we spend our days twittering and Facebooking, and I do Facebook. This is part of where we live.

I’m a grandmother, what about these young children who are seeing the world through a lens, who can be in a place where a building is burning down and you see a camera taking a picture of them taking a picture of the disaster.

Or a child’s birthday party that they’re experiencing through the lens. You say well, what’s wrong with that? Well, because when they want the story of what happened that day, they will return to the recording. They will not return to the memory. They will not know how to reconstruct it and recount it using words. They will lose the art of story, I think. And I think that would be a terrible loss in this manner. I mean, the way we tell stories, because stories, we have the studies, it actually connects human beings, neurologically we connect when we tell stories. How cool is that?

I think a picture book is, I’ve always said is sort of you take War and Peace and turn it into haiku. And so the challenge is to take out every single possible word that you don’t absolutely need. Or that can be seen in the pictures. Why say that the mouse has a red vest when he’s wearing a red vest in the illustration?

So although the writing comes first you think ahead, what can I remove? So that it’s a process of sort of truncating and truncating and truncating until the story comes very clean. With a novel I loved it, because I kept writing these tiny little short chapters, Randall and I, Randall Wright. And he had written novels before and that’s how this story came together. We were at a conference in Utah and we were swapping stories and I told him the one about the Cheshire Cheese Cat. And he said, “Have you written it?” And I said, no, it’s a novel. He goes, “I’ll write it with you.” And, of course, as the writer I went, “My story, my story. My precious, it’s mine.”

But he convinced me. He said, “Look, you’ve never written a novel, we could do this together?” And I said, “But we’ve never … how do we get one voice?” He said, “I don’t know, that’s the great thing, we haven’t been ruined yet. We don’t know how to do it right or how to do it well or how to do it poorly. Let’s just try.” So he flew out and my husband made countless meals for us, we worked 12 and 14 hour days and loved every blessed minute of it.

He would write a chapter then I would rewrite it and then he would write it, because we had an arc, you know, we had a story. And then he would give it to me, we’d do it half dozen of times, a dozen times. And then the person who finished that chapter would sit back and say you do the next one. And then say I would write that one, hand it to him. We’d go through the same process, slowly a voice emerged.

And a lot of, you know, wonderful nitpicking, I don’t want this in there, I do what this. And so sometimes you win by attrition.

I’ve never had so much fun working on a story. It’s a gentle story. No one gets blown up, although there’s a lot of tension and there are betrayals and there’s skullduggery and there is cheese. But it’s about the old Cheshire Inn I visited in London with my daughters. And it’s marvelous. Samuel Johnson used to hold court there and Charles Dickens not only wrote there there’s actually a brass plaque that says this is the place where the author Charles Dickens often sat to write. It was marvelous.

And in the story of course Dickens, it becomes ancillary. He is not a primary part of the story, but you read as he being a writer is observing what’s going on and putting together his own version of what he thinks is happening in this inn with these animals. It is an animal fantasy historical fiction, sort of, kind of thing. And a mouse and a cat become friends. And then they don’t. And then they do. And then there are many surprises. And some are lost. And some are found.

I have a book called Martina the Beautiful Cockroach. And when I first say the name to children they all go, “Ewww!”, because they’re kids, and are like, “Tell us more.”

Because they love things that are disgusting. And the idea of a beautiful cockroach? Oh, please, how could that be? That’s what’s wonderful about that story. When I researched that story, as it was nearing publication, I wasn’t comfortable with what I’d found. Yes, it was a Cuban folktale because it was told in Cuba from the time even my grandmother’s time and before. But it was also Central American.

And then I find this fantastic little book of folklore. It’s out of print and it was Persian folktales. And inside there’s a story called Mistress Cockroach. And there’s Martina. Only in the Spanish version and Central and South American version she has a peine (a hair comb) and a mantilla, a lace shawl, and she sit on a balcon (a balcony).

In the Persian one, she had a purple dress made from the skin of an eggplant used often in Persian cooking. It’s marvelous. But the story’s the same. It’s wonderful, wonderful. So why are these stories wonderful? I think they connect us, that’s one of the things. They remind us we’re part of one human family, with one narrative that changes clothes or eggplants from one place to the other.

It changes manner of dress. It travels now to, maybe to the U.S. And now the story becomes about a South Georgia farmer and he has a cockroach that keeps getting into the corn pen. And he sees he one day seated out there in her beautiful scarf and his fan and that, “How you doing this morning?”

In Last Stop on Market Street, thematically I had been trying to cover this territory in a young adult book and it just wasn’t working. And then I was alerted to an image on a young illustrator’s blog. It was a grandmother and her grandson on the bus. 

And I remember the minute I saw that, my agent sent it to me, who ultimately became the agent for Christian Robinson, and it was his blog. And when I saw that image I was like, “Oh, my gosh, the book I had been trying to write as a young adult needs to be a picture book.” And so, then I started to think about this grandmother figure. 

And for me, I had a grandmother who was the center figure in our family, my Grandmother Nettie. And so I thought of her and I thought of me because I spent a lot of time with her when I was a kid. I even lived with her for a while. And so I thought of her presence in my life and so I sort of wrote the story with that in mind. And it was kind of an “own voice” thing, where I had taken public transportation much of my young life. 

But then when I was still in the process of revising the book, I was introduced to Christian Robinson for the first time, who I knew was going to illustrate it, and he was with his grandmother. And I remember I got to talk to them for about fifteen or twenty minutes. And I just saw the grace and dignity that she had. 

You know, she had raised Christian in a one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles with a few of his cousins. And I realized at the end of that interaction that I actually had to take myself out of the book and I had to lean toward his experience. It had to be that way. And you know, there’s no “find and replace” for race, on your keyboard. So it means you basically have to rewrite the entire book with this new vision in mind. 

So I’ll actually say, the book was in a way inspired by multiple grandmothers. It started with my own grandmother. It sort of leaned toward Christian’s grandmother ultimately. But I also got to pull in my daughter’s two grandmothers. My own mom and my wife’s mother. And they both sort of fed the story too. So it’s interesting, I think. There’s a power in the relationship between a grandchild and a grandparent that had to be part of that story. 

Originally in Last Stop on Market Street, one of the themes was that CJ wasn’t raised by his parents. It wasn’t a traditional family and that was stated directly in the story. But then I realized that I needed to be cleaner and more efficient in the story. So I took all of that out except for one tiny detail that most people don’t really see as kind of residue of this theme. 

When CJ closes his eyes on the bus, he imagines a family of hawks. And so that’s the one illusion to the traditional family. And it’s just a passing thought because he’s a young boy growing up in America, influenced by the media that surrounds him. So in all the commercials, he’s probably seeing traditional families. In all of the books he’s read, he’s probably mostly seeing traditional families. So there is that residue. But obviously you see that that relationship between CJ and his grandmother is what raises him. 

I think ultimately Milo Imagines the World is a journey of a boy learning how to understand how others see him, and also how he sees himself. And so there are two things going on there.

He’s speculating about the people around him on very little information. So he imagines this scraggly-faced guy who’s doing a crossword looks a little disheveled. He imagines him going off to an apartment that maybe has a lot of cats and trash and maybe he’s a lonely man. So he makes that leap from this visual information, he’s slightly disheveled and he has a little bit of a scraggly beard, to a lonely existence.

Well, I think part of the journey on the subway to visit his mother, part of that journey in terms of his interior journey, is that he’s also beginning to connect the way he’s making these judgments based on very little information, and the way people might be judging him similarly with very little information.

And there’s a young boy who he thinks dressed really nice, and he’s got a perfect part and shoes with no scuffs. And he thinks, “Well, this kid, this light-skinned boy, is probably living in a castle. He’s got a great life.” And there’s one moment I think that’s to me the most important moment in the book where they look at each other and in that strange moment of connecting visually, I think Milo’s heart sinks.

Because when he looks at this boy he sees all the possibilities that this boy has that he doesn’t have. And in that way he’s actually stereotyping himself, which we don’t often talk about with this book. And I think he’s building walls around himself in that moment, that he’s not fully aware of.

And I’ll tell you, this comes from my own childhood. I remember we never went to restaurants. And one time a friend’s family took me to a restaurant and I was so nervous because it had cloth napkins and the waitress was actually asking me what I wanted to order. And I had never experienced this, like, “What salad dressing do you want?” And I was so confused, and like, literally sweating.

And then I saw this other boy who was the same age as me at a couple tables away. And I remember he just seemed so confident. And two things ran through my mind at that moment. First I thought, “This kid, he just has different access to the world than I do and I’m never going to have the opportunities he has,” and it made me feel like my life was more limited. And then I also thought, “If I ever have any money, I’m going to go to restaurants every day so I know how to do this,” and I also thought it was fun.

But I think, in that moment, Milo’s feeling something similar. He’s actually building walls around his own possibilities by judging himself against somebody else. Now, when he sees that this same boy is going to the same destination that he is, that he also has an incarcerated mother, it pops something. And now he has to confront that, “Maybe these judgments that I have, that are based on stereotypes, lazy stereotypes, maybe they’re in need of revision, or maybe I need to be less confident about them.”

And so I think what I was really trying to challenge young people to do is, is understand that when you see somebody on the street and you sort of do lean on these lazy stereotypes that we all lean on, try to be more generous with people around you, because behind every face we see on the street there’s an entire story that we don’t have access to. And I think if we understand that, we will be more generous with people around us.

Yes, when people talk about Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop’s work, and she talks about books being windows and mirrors, and sliding doors for children to be able to, not just see themselves, but to see their peers in the world around them.

What I am very conscious of is whoever is the subject, whether that’s in my fiction work, like At the Mountain’s Base, which is a 111-word poem about a family waiting for their family member who is a female pilot in battle to come home. Or non-fiction — the Mary Golda Ross biography Classified, or We Are Grateful, or We Are Still Here — I’m looking to center who is depicted in that story, and making sure that I am providing as authentic a representation as I know how to.

And that’s not just me as the person, that’s also consulting with other people, and other sources. As I’m always saying, bookmaking is a team sport. And so I am one person in the team, I am not the leader of the team, I am literally one person, and a lot of times I feel like I’m the information gatherer, the fact gatherer. I’m going to kind of put things together and organize it, but then other people are going to take parts of it and run with it. 

If that book is about Cherokee people, then I want whoever opens that up to feel like they see themselves. 

And knowing that we all have experiences and things, but there are a lot, there are commonalities, right? My hope is that there is also universality in what I’m talking about and so that others will be able to not just learn something about a person, or an experience, or an event that they may not know about, but they are able to tie that to their own lives. And so I think about Indian No More that my late friend Charlene Willing McManis wrote, and I finished and got published.

That book is looking at a young child who is forced to move in the late-50s from her tribe’s reservation in Northwest, what is now Northwest Oregon to Los Angeles. The majority of children in this country, because we’re such a mobile society, have had experience with moving, even if it’s just in the same town, right? But they may have ended up in a different school. Somehow their life has been disrupted. 

And many children, especially once you start socializing outside of your house, have experiences with meeting other people who don’t do the same thing as you or things that you don’t even know are cultural practices that you have, other people may think very different things or receive very different messages about the things that your family does. And so then you start hearing that feedback and it’s wild. [chuckles] You know, as a child to think like, ‘What? Where did you get that?’ 

After my son was born, I started looking at the collection of children’s books, because I had collected children’s books since I was an undergrad. One of my classes was looking at what is the representation of children of mixed-race backgrounds in books. And so I was looking at, well, how are Native children represented in books?

Because when I was a kid there really wasn’t representation of us by us. You would see characters in a book, let’s say Little House on the Prairie books, or things like that. I didn’t find those books interesting to read, so I didn’t read much past the first one, and I was a prolific reader. But, when I would read about those characters they looked nothing and acted nothing like my community or what I knew, so I was like, ‘Well these must be some folks somewhere else because they don’t seem like anyone I know.’

And of course it wasn’t until later that I realized that these folks have no real knowledge of Native people. Like, they’re not trying to show our full humanity, our complexity as fellow humans. 

What we’ve seen I would say even in the last five years has been just tremendous in terms of a variety of voices coming. Are we anywhere near where we need to be? Unfortunately, we are not. But all I can do is bring my background and skills and abilities to try to address the problem. You know, that’s how I was raised. If you see a problem, how can you be a part of the solution?

And part of that is helping to mentor and bring other Native writers or artists as illustrators into the field. So really that goes in line with my Cherokee identity — we are to be part of the community, we are to uplift other people, and provide that helping hand where it’s desired. 

Like I say, there are universal themes in all the books and things that kids can relate to, but I’m always centering who is depicted in that book and making sure that their full humanity is relevant and centered, and the focus on the page because that’s what has been missing. And when you see yourself depicted, as I did as a child, like I say, with the shell of characters and very gross stereotypes, you disassociate from that because you’re like, ‘This is not anything I recognize.’ How could you think this is what Indians are, or Cherokee people, or any tribe?

Nothing, of course, from my childhood ever addressed that we were sovereign nations. That our nations have existed for tens of thousands of years. Tthe Native Nations have always been here, and so that’s something else that I want to help children understand because that’s not been part of what we’ve ever talked about in this country, and yet it’s a reality from before it ever started and certainly since then.

Our history tends to be like, ‘okay, 1492 is where we’re going to start,’ and then there’s like a brief paragraph prior to that about the Bering Strait. Now thankfully science has finally caught up to our stories and what we have always known; that theory has been debunked in the last five years. But I was like, ‘We already knew that.’ You know? We’ve known about having thousands of Native Nations from the Arctic to Antarctica on this huge continent.

And their trade networks, and the fact that they got in boats and went across the sea to other places. I mean, people have been moving and doing things forever, and yet that’s not the story that children hear. So I really focus on centering that in my work. 

The story behind We Are Grateful: Otsaliheliga is — I mean, each book is its own distinct entity, of course, and it has its own journey. That book was the easiest to write. I sat down and I made a four-square grid with things that we do in each season. And as the book starts out it talks about the Cherokee people were taught to be grateful, not just for wonderful things, but also difficulties in our life.

And I wanted to have at least one thing in each season that might be difficult, whether that’s sending a family member off to military service. Whatever it is, I wanted something like that in there. And so the book really is like a poem because there’s an opening line in the stanza, then there’s the sub-parts of the stanza, and then each refrain is completed. And each season has its own stanza. And then there’s the ending.

And what, what breaks from that — of course — is that introductory paragraph on the first page. And I really just looked at, okay, now that I have this list of things that happened in each season, like gathering the honeysuckle to make baskets. It was like how do I make that as pleasing to the ear, as well as really tapping into also the five senses? 

I mean, in our daily lives we encounter and deal with all five senses, and we do that across all the seasons, and that needed to very much be an intentional part of what I was working on in the book. 

I wrote the text using ‘we’ meaning the Cherokee people as a collective, but if you look at the art you will see there is a family, a Cherokee family introduced on the first page whose members will appear throughout the book. You kind of follow them through the story.

It’s literally like the ancestors were right there helping me put everything on the page. The others I’ve had to work a little harder for. 

We Are Still Here! Native American Truths Everyone Should Know came to me early on. One of the things that I was very angry about as a first-generation college graduate is why am I just now learning the larger experience of Native Nations in this country? Like I am paying for an education and I’m learning this, I did not have this in K-12. 

Yes, I knew there were things that had happened to my tribe, the Cherokee Nation, but I was not aware of the fact that were many things that were systematic and were happening to many Native Nations simultaneously, like forced removal. One of the things we talk about in this country that people will associate with the Cherokee Tribe is the Trail of Tears. 

Well, many – okay, hundreds — of Native Nations have been forcibly removed. So there’s not just one forced removal, there are many. And we do a disservice to our young people. This is all history we need to know. I wanted badly to write this book, and I thought, ‘How am I going to do this as a picture book and who is going to publish this?’

And of course, the hardest part for me was I have a background in law and policy — what am I going to do with the vocabulary? 

I wanted one book that showed when we disappear from curriculum, which is generally after 1900 in all textbooks, what happened? We did not disappear, we are still here. You don’t see that. You don’t get to experience that, not in the classroom really or until very recently in mainstream media.

And I’m so grateful for Frané, because as much as I was struggling with the vocabulary to make it as accessible as possible for upper-elementary and beyond, I also wanted to make sure that the artwork came along. She was a perfect match in that because I feel like she took a very representative image in each of those topics, and there are 12 topics in the book that really helps you understand what I’m talking about. 

But it was also critical to have the timeline in the back. So for those students, if it’s being used in classroom use, or even families to talk about, okay, so relocation is happening in the 50s and 60s, and a lot of Native people are being moved by the federal government off of their lands, so it’s another removal, right? It’s voluntary, but who they’re moving are impoverished people from reservations to become impoverished people in the cities. 

The timeline in the back tells you all these other things that are going in that same timeframe, because again, what do we talk about in this country in terms of the 1950s? We’ll talk about the Civil Rights Movement, we’ll talk about the space race, we’ll talk about the Cold War, we don’t talk about that termination is happening and relocation is happening. 

My hope is that classrooms will take information, that families will take information, and begin to understand that there’s more than you’ve been told, and for every community member that lives in this nation you should know this. This is not information that should be kept from you, and that’s really my hope for the book that it gives that information in understandable bite-sized chunks.  

And I recently had the opportunity to visit the Cherokee Nation’s Immersion School. I met with third graders. I knew they had read the book, their teacher had shared that. Unbeknownst to me, they had each prepared their own topics. She had 12 students in the class and each of the 12 topics they took on, and explained in the Cherokee language, alright, this is an immersion school so they don’t speak English in the classroom, everything is writing in the Cherokee syllabary, and that’s what they speak.

And they had taken each topic and what it meant to them. I almost started crying when this was explained to me because this is exactly what I wanted to have happen with this book, again, whether the kids are Cherokee, other Native Nations, or non-Native that they would take on the topic and learn something and apply it to their lives. And so to see our children from the Cherokee Nation taking this information in and understanding it at third grade, I mean, I was like, ‘It’s never going to get any better than this as an author for me.’ 

How much different our lives would be today if I had had that information and my generation had that information in third grade — wow, wow. 

The inclusion of a Native language, whether that’s Cherokee or any other language in books for young people now is much more, becoming much more common, which is wonderful. And it’s not that there weren’t books published before, because Charlesbridge had done a book back in 1994 called Itse Selu which was the Cherokee Harvest Festival book, so I knew it was very much possible to put the Cherokee words in a book, and so I did.

I have a complete Cherokee language version of At the Mountain’s Base, that’s an e-book that you can get in the Cherokee Syllabary. For our immersion school, for adults that are learning and families that are learning the language online, that’s a wonderful book then for them to be able to read in the Cherokee Syllabary.

I did a short story in Ancestor Approved, which is a middle-grade anthology that came out in February of 2021, and I centered that with an Ojibwe family in Michigan, and I used a lot of Ojibwe words in that, and consulted with a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who is an Ojibwe expert on that. 

For me, wherever I can put that language in that makes sense I’m going to. For Indian No More, Charlene my co-author, she had used the Chinuk Wawa language which is what the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde speak, and that’s what the young people learn now, so that’s in the book as well. 

Anytime that it works — because again, if you are writing an authentic piece, there are many families that use that language. They will use English and their language, sometimes they’ll just speak in their language, so it makes sense to have that in the story, but also if we’re going to support Native language revitalization, right, so many of our grandparents and great grandparents lost their language through the boarding schools. 

In order to help that, we have to do our part. And so, I see including Native language in trade books as helping assist in that effort and also letting other kids know that there have been numerous languages on this continent long before any languages arrived from Europe. 

The form of biography really interests me I suppose because I read so many when I was younger and was very familiar. As a kid I remember walking into the new Saratoga Public Library children’s room and saying I’m going to read every book in this place, and I just about did. It took me about seven years, but I just about did. And I loved true stories about people’s lives. But I noticed that so often stories about American Indian people were highly inaccurate, often very biased, did not give the character credit for intelligence or emotional maturity or complexity or humor.

The lack of humor just shocked me because any time I was around other Native people, there was always joking and teasing going on even in some of the most serious situations. So, when I decided to write biography, I wanted to try to bring those elements to the table and to tell things from a point of view that reflected a tribal reality that people in that tribal nation would recognize.

And as I’ve written these books, I’ve never done them in isolation. I’ve never done it with simple research from texts. If I use text, I use primary material, but I go beyond that. I go to the actual tribal nation itself, speak with people, talk with descendants of these people, and try to get an understanding of how they would want the story told. So, if you take a book like my picture book, Crazy Horse’s Vision, I worked very closely with S. D. Nelson who illustrated it because he himself is from Crazy Horse’s people. And in doing his illustrations he and I made changes in my text so that the illustrations and the text would work together in a much more effective fashion.

My son, Jesse, who teaches Abenaki all around New England, a very fluent speaker, even has a website called WesternAbenaki.com., he and I have begun doing bilingual texts.

So, it’s English line by line translated from Abenaki and then a third version which is then sort of colloquial English. So you can see the process of moving from one language to the other. And I think it’s very interesting because if for example I would say I live in Saratoga Springs, in Abenaki I would say [Abenaki].

I am of Saratoga or the medicine spring place. So, it’s [unint.] I am of that place. And that gives a different sense than just living there. You are of that place, not just from that place. And there’s a linguistic difference between the two.

In virtually all the writing about American Indian people, men are always lionized and women are always secondary. And the image of the Native woman as sort of a beast of burden, a person with no power is a European trope.

It’s not the reality within our Native cultures. Women are central and powerful. I remember my friend [unint.] of the Onondaga Nation. When I visited her one day in Syracuse, I said – this was back some decades ago, “What do you think about the Equal Rights Amendment?” And she said, “Oh, I don’t know about it.” I said, “What”? She said, “Yeah, I don’t think men could ever be equal to women.” But that sense of humor was making a really good point.

Another point, when I was at Onondaga, there was a reading being done of the wampum belts. The wampum belts are very significant. They maintain history and relationships between cultures, and they’re a very, very important part of Northeastern tradition. And one of the chiefs was holding up a wampum belt and describing it. And I was sitting in the back with some of the clan mothers, and one of my friends, Audrey Shenandoah, who was a clan mother, said, “Uh, excuse me. Excuse me.” And then she said, “You got it upside down.” He goes, “That’s why we got clan mothers,” and he turned it right side up.

But there is a sort of image there that men often do get it upside down, and it takes the women to turn it right side up.

I do a lot of writing about nature, and I suppose there are a number of reasons for that. One is that I lived in the country. I grew up in a natural setting in northern New York State. The Adirondack Mountains are in my backyard really truly. And my grandfather spent a lot of time in the woods. He was a lumberjack as well as being a Native American and would always take me into the forest.

So, I felt that connection from a very early age. I was writing little stories about animals. I was collecting plants and bringing in animals and keeping them as pets and then releasing them. And when I went to Cornell University, I went as a major in wildlife conservation. For three years, I was a wildlife conservation major and then I took some courses in creative writing and switched my major.

And I think that background has made it seem very natural for me to always have that as a component of my reality, that natural world. In fact, the 90‑acre property that belonged to my grandparents and great‑grandparents is now a nature preserve where my son, Jim, created something called the Ndakinna Education Center. Ndakinna means “our land” in Abenaki.

And on that nature preserve we teach animal tracking, wilderness survival skills, we do storytelling, we bring in Native and non-native speakers on nature and on our traditional culture, we do language immersion classes, and we do what we call the arts of life, which brings together body and spirit and mind and emotion to try to make a more balanced life.

When teachers and librarians are choosing books with Native stories or native themes or Native tales, there are a number of things they should do. One, they consider who the author is. What is the author’s legitimate connection to this material? See what is cited in the book. What are the sources for this material? And sometimes they can turn to guides such as Through Indian Eyes, a book by Doris Seale and Beverly Slapin or A Broken Flute by the same two authors, which are surveys of children’s literature books by and about Native Americans.

I think that you owe it to yourself and to your school to be as informed as possible. And you owe it also I think to the community of humanity in general to see American Indian literature and stories not as separate, not as a little category to put off in a corner, but as something that’s part of the body of world literature that should be inclusive and that we as human beings have so many things in common, we’re part of the same circle, but every point on the circle is unique. And therefore, we need to recognize the uniqueness of the perspective from that point on that deeply connected circle.

Origami Yoda is a very different book without the pictures, because it’s really two narrators, there’s Tommy that tells the main story and then there’s Kellen who he tells his story through his doodles. He’s the guy that doodles in it. And Tommy is sort of this series kid in some ways and Kellen is just gonzo and, and nuts and very funny. And so he’s the guy that goes in and makes the book funny sometimes. If it was, if was just Tommy the books would be a little more serious. So, I’m not all that serious of a person as you can tell, so as for me the books to have that right balance they have to have Tommy and Kellen working together.

Dwight is the main character of my Origami Yoda books and he’s the guy who actually starts the whole thing by making Origami Yoda and bringing Origami Yoda to school. And even before he brings Origami Yoda he’s already like the weird kid at school and this book is not my autobiography, but a lot of stuff in the book really happened to me or to my friends or is inspired by the of disasters that was my middle school career.

But the thing is I didn’t have Origami Yoda. You know, I was like Dwight that doesn’t save the day. It just ended in disaster and I went home miserable. So my book is me telling my stories and my friends stories with Dwight, but Dwight was smarter than me. Dwight found this great positive way to deal with things and that way was Origami Yoda.

So when he brings Origami Yoda to school he saves the day so it, instead of being a disaster like it was in real life, often he and his buddies end up coming out on top. And so I didn’t have Origami Yoda, I didn’t have Jedi wisdom to help me get through middle school, so that’s, that’s the idea of the book. Can Dwight and Origami Yoda save the nerds and the weirdoes and the strange kids and get them through middle school alive.

Okay. Well, as you know I did not invent Yoda. Every once in a while I’ll run into a kid who says, “Are you the guy that invented Yoda?” And I have to be like, “No, I’m not the guy that invented Yoda. That was George Lucas.” But George Lucas is this great guy that lets other people play around with his characters and it’s like this giant sandbox he created and a lot of people they get sand boxes and they fill them with toys and they’re like, “No, stay out.”

And we thought that’s what was going to happen, we thought George Lucas would say, no we don’t want you messing around with Yoda. I don’t care if it’s origami; it’s none of your business. It’s been the opposite. When my publisher contacted Lucas Film and they’re the people that have to make all the decisions, Lucas Film was like, “Come on in and play, let’s go, do whatever you want!”

And so instead of me trying to sneak around and steal their idea, it’s like they’re sharing and I’m having a great time and they’re very, very supportive. It’s been, it’s been a terrific experience.

So I think that a lot of kids have been somehow left behind for a lot of years of their life. Either they weren’t a good reader, or they weren’t up to the level of their classmates, and you know. That means they didn’t get to experience the joy of like, sitting down with a good book. But graphic novels so often fill in those gaps, and then those kids become voracious readers, and they’re able to talk about the stories with their classmates and their friends. And so, you know, I was a kid who loved to read comics, and I only had access to comic strips, and a few really underground small published graphic novels that were floating around out there.

The manga boom hadn’t happened yet. The indie comics boom hadn’t really happened yet, so I didn’t know where I was going with it, I just knew I loved it. I wish that I could be a kid today, because they have access to so much good stuff.   

There totally is something called a reluctant reader and I totally understand where they’re coming from because some of the books, there are some books out there that just aren’t particularly interesting. And I think there are people that don’t get anything out reading descriptions and so there is a well meaning teacher who’s like — who’s read a book that’s full of beautiful descriptions and it really moves the teacher so they want this kid to read it. And the kid picks it up and he tries to read it and it’s like oh the — there’s a bunch of stuff in here — it was like a meadow full of — I don’t know — and it gets so boring.

Meanwhile, you can pick-up a cool graphic novel like, Smile by Raina Telgemeier or Fangbone, the novel I was excited about and instead of reading the description you just see a picture of it. And instead of reading three paragraphs about what this kid’s house is like, you just see a picture of the kid’s house and now you can dive right into the action. You can find out what the kids going to do.

And I think there are a lot of people that want to read a book about people doing stuff and there are other people that like to read books about people thinking stuff and oh this is what this kid thinks about their life and there are great books out there about them. There are some amazing authors that write stuff like that, but there are other kids that want to read about what’s this guy going to do.

So you pick up a book about Fangbone, what’s this guy going to do? He’s going to pull out a sword. Awesome! And I, I just think that — I’ve met a lot of great librarians in the last couple of years and there are librarians out there that understand this.

But I tell you if you go in the library and you maybe ask the librarian where the awesome shelf is, they’ve got an awesome shelf and they’ll, they’ll be so happy if you go over there and read the book.

Maybe I can make that my thing. Get an awesome shelf. Maybe put my books on it. No, I’m not sure I would make the cut on the awesome shelf. It would be chalked full of, of, of great stuff, with lots of pictures, lots of excitement. Sharks. That kind of stuff.

I think one of the reasons why graphic novels are so popular at least for me is because they’re a great way to take in a story. With my dyslexia, the type of dyslexia that I have, it’s very difficult for me sometimes to handle a large block of text and especially if you have page after page of large blocks of text, it can be overwhelming sometimes.

But with graphic novels they take those large blocks of text and they break them up into little panels that are very easy to digest. And when they include illustrations with the text, the illustrations tell part of the story and they give contextual clues to the meanings of the words. So not only is it a great way to read a story, but it’s also a great way to tell a story.

For my daughter with dyslexia, the key was graphic novels. And Raina Telgemeier. Oh, bless that woman. If I ever meet her, I’m going to kiss her on the lips. She wrote Smile, and my daughter read Smile, and everything changed. It was just really a breakthrough moment. Just the other day she was asking me, “Has she written anything else? Why hasn’t she written anything else?” For her it was the perfect melding of art.

She’s very artistic anyway, so for her it was a great way for her to see a story unfold. It’s interesting because for me I have a hard time knowing how to read a graphic novel. I love them, but it doesn’t come as naturally to me as, say, parsing a sentence. So that was great. Some kids with dyslexia use audiobooks very successfully, and that can be a key to success. Picture books are great, too. They tend to be reluctant to read them, but if they’ve got adults and older kids who are comfortable or the content is a little more sophisticated, that’s a really good strategy.

One of the most important messages that I hope comes through in all my books is that there are many different ways to be strong and mighty. There are many different ways to be brave. I think when you’re a quiet kid, when you’re an average student, when you fall somewhere in the middle it’s easy to get lost.

And it’s important for us to lift those kids up. But it’s important for those kids themselves to know that they’re strong and you don’t have to be the loudest, the bravest, prettiest, the most handsome, you just have to be the best version of yourself.

So, there were a bunch of reasons for why the graphic novel format was just perfect for El Deafo. One of the less big reasons was the book is a superhero story. I mean it’s about me using this giant hearing aid to hear my teachers wherever they were in the entire school. I mean that’s a super power. So, comics have always been one of the main formats for superhero stories. So that just made sense.

But the main reason, the bigger reason was the speech balloons that are such a big part of graphic novels. So the speech balloons I was able to use to sort of show the experience of being deaf. In the very beginning of the story I actually do have hearing, and when I was about four and a half I got really sick and was in the hospital for a couple weeks and lost my hearing during that time in the hospital.

So in the book there are speech balloons that start out with text that is black, but it gradually fades away to gray and then to nothing. And so the reader sort of is wondering, just like I probably wondered as a kid, well, what’s going on? Suddenly I don’t understand anymore. That’s what the reader’s thinking, and that’s what I was thinking too probably.

Then later after it’s official that I’ve lost my hearing, a lot of the speech balloons are simply blank. And in that case the reader is also trying to be exactly — or was trying to do exactly what I was trying to do, which is figure out what was going on by looking around me for other clues, just like you’re looking around the panel trying to figure out what’s going on in the story. So, blank speech balloons when I couldn’t hear and then speech to me today and it’s very garbled.

I have to be able to see the person speak. If I can’t see them, then I have no idea what they’re saying. It’s sort of I can hear vowels but not consonants. And so the speech in those cases in certain panels where I’m not looking at the speaker, it’s all garbled. It’s nonsense and gibberish. And so once again kids reading the book are having to figure out what’s going on from the other clues in certain panels.

So it was just a perfect format and much more immediate. If I had tried to describe what I was hearing, I would have lost my readers, and they wouldn’t know what it felt like. But they’re right there in the moment, and they know — every time they know exactly what I’m hearing, what I’m not hearing. They know what I’m hearing just by reading those speech balloons and they are right there with me, and the experience becomes their experience, too, so it’s a great format for showing deafness I think.

I think for some readers, some kids really do have trouble. When they see all that text, their mind just closes. And I was kind of one of those kids. I mean I like to read, but I never loved to read. And I think I saw all that text. The closer together it was, the smaller it was, the less likely I wanted to read it. I love getting those large‑print books from the library that were for the older folks, you know. I love this, and I’m turning the page so quickly.

But there was like this sense of satisfaction for readers who maybe have a little bit of difficulty reading. Here are these pictures that help propel me through. It doesn’t take very long to get through a page. Suddenly you read a 220-page book, and you’ve never read a 220-page book in your life. It’s like this gateway to reading maybe things that are more difficult down the road, but I don’t think that that’s all they should be known as.

They are art on their own just like a prose book is art on its own. It is perfect for what it is, but it does help. it has this extra power of being super helpful for helping a lot of people read with more confidence I think.

Well first of all there are lots of pathways to learning, reading is one of them but not the only one. So to realize that there are different kinds of modalities in the way people learn and to accept all of them, it’s fine to learn online, it’s fine to listen to audio books, to watch television documentaries. There are lots of ways to process information, that’s first.

And the other thing that I think is the most important thing for teachers and parents of kids with learning challenges it to play to their strength. So we always say when we’re talking to people if your child has a reading challenge, don’t stress the reading tutor get them an art teacher, get them a music teacher. Go to, every person wants to be great at something and not everyone is going to be great at that standardized test route of reading, repeating, taking tests.

So the thing to do in raising children whether you’re a teacher or a grandparent, or an aunt or an uncle or a parent, is to see the child, to see what they love, to see where their talents and enthusiasm are and provide that for them in their environment, that’s crucial.

Well, the feedback we get on the Hank Zipzer books, we get two primary responses.  We get hundreds of letters a month, hundreds of letters because – we get letters from parents who say things like I was walking down the hall on the way to my bedroom and I heard my child laughing and I opened up the door and they were reading a book.  I mean their parents are just, you know, so many parents say this is the first book my child has ever read.

For a lot of kids who have had reading issues, the Hank books introduce them to reading and there are 18 of them.  It’s a real series so we’re the gateway to reading.  So that’s the reaction we hear a lot from parents but from the kids we hear two things over and over and over.  One is how do you know me so well and that – that’s a thrill and I attribute so much of that to Henry Winkler because he had never written books before so when we came together as a writing partnership I came from the writing part of it and he came from not only acting but from the person who had dyslexia.

And he has been so insistent that we be true to those emotions and kids respond – they say it’s like you were inside of me, how did you know me and he says I know because that’s what I felt.  I know what it feels like to be the one who stands up at the spelling bee and know your words and then forget them the minute you stand up there and I know the humiliation of that.

I know what it’s like when your parents say you’re just lazy and you know that you’ve been working as hard as you can and you’re not lazy, you just can’t do it.  So how do you know me so well is the thing that we hear over and over and that’s really attributable to his unsparing honesty in remembering what the process is like.  And the other thing we hear is about the humor.

Kids say I laughed so hard my funny bone fell out of my elbow, you know?  Because it’s a – they’re funny and they’re very funny and they’re intentionally very funny because we want the sound of laughter because that’s how – first of all, that’s how you understand yourself and that’s how it makes reading a pleasure and if you’re going to go on to read other things, you start with looking at reading as an entertainment.

So what we hear is how did you know me and that this is unbelievably funny, hysterical.  Kids all say this is hysterical, your books are hysterical.  And then there are a lot of kids who write and say I’m not – I don’t have learning challenges but my brother does or my next door neighbor does or my best friend does and that’s really touching too because the statistics are that one in five kids in America has some kind of learning issue, one in five.

That means if it’s not you, it’s the person two doors down from you, so one of the things we’re trying to encourage is for people to understand that this is – that everybody learns differently and this doesn’t affect your future.  This doesn’t limit your future.  It just means that you have to be taught differently and you have to figure out ways to learn that —stimulate yourself and you have to figure out what you’re good at.

When we go out to schools, we always ask the kids what are you good at and a lot of times we’re speaking at schools where there’s a high percentage of kids with learning differences and they all say well I stink at school, I’m a bad student, I’m terrible at school.  We say okay, yeah, we get that but what are you good at? 

And it’s amazing what they say.  One kid said well I’m a really good friend.  I said yeah, how about that?  Well I’m good at basketball, I’m good at drawing, you know, I’m good at talking to grown—ups, you know?  So you start to see the array of things that people are good at and to try and help them think of ways that that is their gift.  You know, everyone has destiny and your destiny will work out best if you use the gifts that you have and not focus on the gifts that you don’t have, you know?

There’s a very famous educational psychologist who wrote if your child has a reading disability, don’t get them a reading tutor, get them an art teacher.   So you go to your – you go to your strengths and you figure out what’s unique about you.  Whether or not you have a learning challenge, this is what we all do in life, right?  You say well, you know, I know my parents want me to be a physicist but I really want to make clothes.

And we all struggle with that, you know?  My parents did not want me to be a writer.  They wanted me to be a nurse because a nurse was a good profession for a young girl.  They thought that was secure.  And a writer, a writer lives in a garret and, you know, will starve and then when I refused to be a nurse they said all right, well then you have to be a teacher and I said all right, well I can live with that and I did.

I went to graduate school.  I got a teaching credential and I was a very bad teacher because I didn’t – it just wasn’t natural for me and so I tried it and in the end it was me having to rebel against my parent’s themes to say no, no, that isn’t – I’m never going to be really good at that, you know?  I so admire excellent teachers, but I wasn’t going to be one because I just didn’t have the gift for it.

So the trick is to find a supportive community, your family, adults, friends, teachers, counselors, gatekeepers of all kind who will help you see yourself for what you are and to run after that with all your heart and soul and passion and not try and fit into a mold that wasn’t designed for you.