you have 8 minutes! GO!

i shared the stage today with 4 fabulous kidlit makers. 3 of whom were there to share their first book! i was so HAPPY for them!

emily jiang and april chu are the author and artist respectively, of ‘summoning the phoenix: poems and prose about chinese musical instruments.’

emily is a composer and her poems, perspective and instrument information were beautiful! and the illustrations by april??? to die for!!! we all had our necks twisted to see them when they were projected on the big screen behind us!

and janay brown wood  shared her first book, ‘imani’s moon.’ another gorgeous book, illustrated by hazel mitchell.                               i wanted to dive into the imagery and follow imani’s journey to touch the moon. janay is a fabulous delight and we were all pleased that her inspiring energy closed our presentation.

the old timers on the panel were me and tim myers, a great presence with that storyteller tweak. he shared extremely humorous stories about himself before bringing up ‘down at the dino wash deluxe‘ illustrated by macky pamintuan.

ya gotta love a book with dinosaurs! especially ones that go to a deluxe wash run by kids!

and then there was me. ‘call me tree’ comes out november 13! even though it’s my 27th book, it still holds ‘that feeling.’ i don’t have it hand, but i am sharing sneak preveiws!

we each had 8 MINUTES to share with some 250 k-2 students about our work! it was fast and sweet (we did 2 assemblies in a row!) and i have to say, a number of times we laughed our heads off. thank you summer laurie for all your work. it was a lovely!

(pic: tim myers, moi, janay brown wood, april chu and emily jiang at kidquake sf 2014)