I’m no stranger to the inequities that exist for People of Color, Indigenous and Queer authors and artists. I’ve been teaching and lecturing about it and its impact for 20 years in the children’s book industry. I speak from knowing and teach from understanding on a personal level. So why …
What I shared in Part One and Part Two of this series contributes to why I felt driven to stronger action with School of the Free Mind, my online school. The children’s book industry feels like a state of emergency for our communities and a powerful place to invest our …
A new bilingual children’s book series that celebrates LGBTQ history through the lens of multicultural and multigenerational queer family The Pop-Ups’ Picnic, the first book in the series, will be published by Reflection Press in 2017 The Pop-Ups are what we call GrandPop and PopPop, Sky’s grandfathers. Like all grandparents, …
I just released Children’s Books as a Radical Act on Indiegogo to support my first 6 independently published children’s books. What makes these books radical? Why is it noteworthy that they’re independently published? Why children’s books of all things? Radical? Any time we center ourselves as POC, indigenous or queer …
Ever since Matthew and I learned to publish books for ourselves, we have been sharing how to do it with others! True power rises and I could feel the power as soon as we began, and the desire to share it. What I know is that our work is never …
The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” – Alice Walker I’ve met a lot of powerful children’s book makers over these past few years teaching The Heart of It: Creating Children’s Books that Matter. I decided from the beginning that whenever …
The Falling. It’s that delicious time of year when there’s a detectable shift in the seasons. I can feel the changing, the Falling, as everything around me shimmers through yet another of our eternal cycles. I’ve been craving this shift, longing for it. Today after a hot spell, the skies …
I’ll never forget it. In February of last year I had this wild idea that I thought just might work…. It was at that critical mass moment right before the diversity conversation exploded in the children’s book world with assistance from the #WeNeedDiverseBooks campaign later that summer. Many of us …
You may or may not notice something different about my new book, Call Me Tree. Nowhere in the story are boy/girl or pronouns used. No ‘he’ or ‘she’ anywhere! I found it easy to write this way because that’s how I think of kids, as kids, not boy kids or …
While my first Heart of It e-course officially ended back in May, that was by no means the end of the experience! Over twenty artistauthors decided to contribute to our first ever Heart of It collection children’s book. (The “official” title is yet to be decided.) Since the end of …
