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Week in Review, June 25th-29th

This week on hbook.com…

From the July/August 2018 issue of The Horn Book Magazine: Special Issue: ALA Awards:

• 2018 Newbery Medal Acceptance by Erin Entrada Kelly
• “Hello, Erin Entrada Kelly”: Profile by Virginia Duncan
• 2018 Caldecott Medal Acceptance by Matthew Cordell
• Profile of Matthew Cordell by Julie Halpern
• 2018 CSK Author Award Acceptance by Renée Watson
• Profile of Renée Watson by Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich
• 2018 CSK Illustrator Award Acceptance by Ekua Holmes
• Profile of Ekua Holmes by Liz Bicknell

Reviews of the Week:

• Picture Book: New Shoes by Chris Raschka
• Fiction: Give Me Some Truth by Eric Gansworth
• Nonfiction: Water Land: Land and Water Forms 
Around the World by Christy Hale

Read Roger: Tell Laura I love her

Out of the Box: Conference report: Association of Jewish Libraries 2018

See overviews of previous weeks by clicking the tag week in review. Find us on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram to keep up-to-date!

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2018 CSK Illustrator Award Acceptance by Ekua Holmes

Ekua Holmes. Photo: Clennon King.

Good morning, and thank you, everyone, for being here to celebrate these awards and honors with us. To all the honorees, I feel like we are at a family gathering. Isn’t it fitting that this event takes place on a Sunday? In my family, Sunday was the day for family and God. Set apart from the other six days of toil and trouble, Sundays were good food; aunts, uncles, and cousins in number; playing in our good clothes, at least until someone told us to put on some play clothes. Sunday was dressing up and wearing a hat and maybe some gloves and for sure some patent-leather shoes. I love that this event happens on a Sunday, and I know it’s no mistake.

Today, I feel a deep well of gratitude to the Coretta Scott King Book Awards Jury. Your dedication to countless hours of reading, looking, analyzing, feeling, and discussing hundreds of books is mind-blowing. I thank you from the absolute bottom of my heart for choosing Out of Wonder as a book to pay attention to, to enjoy, to share, and to collect. When I got the call, I was so out of touch that I wondered why Sam Bloom was calling me, even though I thought, It’s nice to hear from him. The Colorado number didn’t even give me a hint. With cell phones, who knows where calls are coming from? Our telephone numbers no longer give a sense of geography. All he said was, “I’ve got some very good news for you,” and it all clicked in. Cutting him off, I began to scream and dance in my kitchen. I hope I didn’t hurt his ear. It was so loud that my partner, Clennon, ran upstairs to see if I was being attacked. Then the call got disconnected. I didn’t know what the good news was, but I knew it was good and I knew it came from Colorado. That was all I needed to hear. Thank you, CSK jury, for cheering me on and giving me this wonderful recognition.

Every day when I wake up, no matter what problems or stresses I’m dealing with, I know I’m gonna get to do my work. Telling stories out of scraps and pieces, color and form, light and love. It’s the best job I’ve ever had.

Thank you, Kwame Alexander, for creating the perfect second book for me. Thank you for reminding me that I love poetry and reconnecting me with so many of the poets I had lost contact with.

The challenge of this book, as I saw it, was to illustrate twenty different ideas reflecting various styles, times, and personalities. I went from illustrating a single life in Voice of Freedom: Fannie Lou Hamer, Spirit of the Civil Rights Movement to illustrating multiple lives; from concentrating on one part of the world to looking at multiple worlds, multiple viewpoints and styles and colors — but I wanted to do so in a way that still allowed each image to be connected to the others.

An African proverb says, “If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” With this book, I did not go alone. I traveled the road less taken with Robert Frost, danced on a magic love rug with E. E. Cummings, went off to school to blossom with Bashō, and walked into a snowy day with Nikki. I went to church for prayer with Langston and to the basketball courts of Harlem for a jump shot with Walter Dean. Emily and I grew roses of exceptional beauty. I even created some paintings in blues and other hues with Terrance. The only daughter became la luna for a new generation. I stayed at the guesthouse with my friend Rumi; I welcomed a doctor’s house call and meditated on flying with the birds. In this project, the ordinary became extraordinary.

Kwame, Chris, and Marjory’s poems took me around the world and across the ages with bits and pieces, scraps and cuttings of color and form and rhythm and rhyme.

In that spirit, I’d like to accept this award especially in honor of four great women poets who are celebrated in Out of Wonder: Lucille Clifton, Gwendolyn Brooks, Nikki Giovanni, and Maya Angelou. I knew these four courageous and audacious women already from my teenage years, when their words were comfort food for my generation, when they crafted pathways to understanding and self-awareness for many young black women.

Lucille Clifton inspired the title of the book. Her work, spun out of brevity, speaks so tenderly of love and loneliness, family and urban life, and women’s lives. She said, “Poems come out of wonder, not out of knowing.” That’s the same place our best work comes from: the colors, lines, and forms of painting and the planes of sculpture and craft — the music and the dance, the poetry and song.

Gwendolyn Brooks’s poetry speaks powerfully of black Americans’ everyday lives. She said, “What I’m fighting for now in my work [is] for an expression relevant to all manner of blacks, poems I could take into a tavern, into the street, into the halls of a housing project.” Her work sings with reality and humanity.

Nikki Giovanni described a world I wanted to visit during my summer vacation. With scenes from her childhood in Knoxville, Tennessee, she connected me with scenes from my own summers in Prescott, Arkansas. From snowflakes to backyard barbecues, she reminds us that there is poetry in everything if we are looking and listening. She celebrates our world, and she praises our unique style as black Americans.

“Style,” she wrote, “has a profound meaning to Black Americans. If we can’t drive, we will invent walks and the world will envy the dexterity of our feet. If we can’t have ham, we will boil chitterlings; if we are given rotten peaches, we will make cobblers; if given scraps, we will make quilts; take away our drums, and we will clap our hands.”

And finally Maya Angelou, a Renaissance woman: poet, singer, dancer, actor, memoirist, and civil rights activist. It was fitting that the book end with a celebration of her in “Majestic,” because she helped us to understand that confinement in mind or body cannot suppress our creativity or our desire to be free.

Lucille, Gwendolyn, Nikki, and Maya. Their poems celebrate us in all our radiance and complexity. Each of them wrote books for children, too. To celebrate them is to celebrate ourselves, our humanity, and our thirst for justice and joy.

As artists, we are gatherers of words, thoughts, impressions, and fresh connections. Speaking to new generations through literature and art raises the bar of our responsibility and our creative challenge. I am so proud to be among the visual voices that children today and tomorrow will hear and see. I’m humbled by it, motivated by it.

So thank you to Lucille, Gwendolyn, Nikki, and Maya. Without the power of your beautiful and challenging words, I would not be here speaking today.

Thank you to all who support my work in the world. To everyone at Candlewick Press. To my agent, Rubin Pfeffer. To my Roxbury hometown friends and family. I thank you for years of encouragement and care. To the team that supports me at home: my son, Kai; my granddaughter, Song; and my love, Clennon King. I don’t do this work just for you, but I could not do it without you.

Ekua Holmes is the winner of the 2018 Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award for Out of Wonder: Poems Celebrating Poets, written by Kwame Alexander with Chris Colderley and Marjory Wentworth and published by Candlewick Press. Her acceptance speech was delivered at the annual conference of the American Library Association in New Orleans on June 24, 2018. From the July/August 2018 issue of The Horn Book Magazine: Special Issue: ALA Awards. For more speeches, profiles, and articles click the tag ALA 2018.

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Profile of 2018 CSK Illustrator Award winner Ekua Holmes

Ekua Holmes. Photo: Clennon King.

In late 2011, I acquired a collection of poems from Carole Boston Weatherford about civil rights icon Fannie Lou Hamer. I was overwhelmed by Hamer’s courage and persistence, and I loved Weatherford’s forthright, muscular poems about her. After a round of editing, I began the customary conversation with the art department about what the eventual book would look like. We settled on a large trim size — bold, like Fannie Lou — and started a list of illustrators to consider.

Around that time, Anne Armstrong Moore of our art department shared a postcard from an exhibition at J. P. Licks, a Boston ice-cream shop that shows local artists’ work. Anne was planning on talking to the artist, a certain Ekua Holmes, later that week about possibly doing a book with us, and might she share Carole’s manuscript if we all agreed? We did, and Carole did, too.

Ekua was intrigued — the subject is dear to her heart, and she took it as a good omen that the first poem, “Sunflower County, Mississippi,” referenced her favorite flower — but she seemed also a little skeptical. She came into the office to meet us and discuss how it all might work, and, at the end, said quizzically, “Are you sure you want me to do this?”

Ekua had many questions about the illustration process, and with each my excitement about the book grew — here was another bold woman, signing on to risk something new and giving it her full creative attention. When, in August 2013, Ekua brought in the first two sample color pieces for the book, art director Amy Berniker and I were speechless — such sheer power emanated from the richly layered surfaces. Ekua might have been worried by our silence until she noticed the tears in my eyes. Sometimes, something is so beautiful, so true, that we have no words ready. I was pretty sure at that moment that Ekua was destined for greatness in our field — and looking back through my emails, I see I started obsessively sharing art samples with staff in the marketing and publicity department from then on.

Fast-forward two years, and after excellent reviews and positive media coverage, Voice of Freedom won three awards at ALA 2016 — a John Steptoe New Talent Illustrator Award, a Sibert Honor, and a Caldecott Honor. Ekua was amazed and justly proud of such an incredible achievement.

Before that happened, though, Candlewick Editorial Director Mary Lee Donovan had already offered Ekua a second contract — to illustrate another collection of poetry, Out of Wonder, a tribute to twenty famous poets by Kwame Alexander with Chris Colderley and Marjory Wentworth. A collection that spans continents and centuries is a visual challenge; Ekua would need to evoke the different worlds of Bashō, Rumi, Mary Oliver, and others and yet somehow unify them within the covers of a single book.

A strong color sense and the ability to sympathetically portray the human form through shape are two of the many tools that Ekua brought to this challenge. A poem celebrating Robert Frost is characterized by soft blues and grays. There is snow, a field, stone walls: winter in New England. The poet is depicted in a brown overcoat, walking away from the reader. There is something unknowable and melancholy about him. Contrast that image with the rich reds and oranges of the piece celebrating Gwendolyn Brooks. Gwendolyn is bare-armed, at a piano. Her fingers are long and her nails painted; you can hear the notes those hands just played, and they are soulful. They linger in the air. With a large red flower in her hair, Gwendolyn is strong, triumphant, and gorgeous.

Whenever finished artwork arrives at Candlewick, the designer lays it out on a large table in the art department and invites everyone in the company to come and see it. I wish we had a videotape of the hundred or so staffers gathered around to look at Out of Wonder.

And we all felt so proud when, to our utter delight, Out of Wonder was awarded the 2018 Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award, confirming Ekua’s place in children’s literature history.

As editors and designers, we so often operate on instinct. Nobody ever said aloud in those early meetings: collage is the perfect match for poetry. But the layering of paper, fabric, color, and texture reflects the layering of words, lines, phrases, and stanzas. Each medium informs the reader, but at an angle. And more than mere information is conveyed — emotions, moods, a sense of time and place are all there, too. When poem and illustration are brought together on the page, there’s further alchemy.

And there’s alchemy in the collaborative process that happens while making a book. The author, the editor, the illustrator, and the designer function as best they can as four parts of the same brain, a brain that is writing and illustrating, editing and designing this one picture book.

The personal connections also intensify. One night, after a book event in southern Massachusetts, I drove Ekua home to Roxbury. We talked for the hour-long journey about our families, how we each approached a project, how the evening’s discussion had gone — and how we both hated driving at night. (This discussion was punctuated by Ekua frequently grabbing the passenger door handle and gasping. Apparently that second career at Uber is not to be mine.)

If we at Candlewick gave Ekua any true assistance, though, it was to demonstrate our full confidence in her so that she might trust her own vision. In her studio are boxes and boxes of paper organized by color — tissue, card, magazines, musical scores, photographs, chunky handmade paper, dust jackets, record sleeves, bookmarks. She takes these humble pieces of everyday life, assembles, disassembles, and reassembles them until the physical artwork satisfies the image in her head.

Creating soaring images from humble materials is the recipe for Ekua’s art and, I think she would say, for her life. Ekua is down-to-earth, unfailingly modest, and a true collaborator. We are now working on a third book, this time a love song to children, The Stuff of Stars. The book opens with a celestial nothingness. How do you depict nothingness? Ekua would not sign her contract until she was sure she could do it. But I was sure that she could.

And she did.

From the July/August 2018 issue of The Horn Book Magazine: Special Issue: ALA Awards. For more speeches, profiles, and articles click the tag ALA 2018.

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2018 CSK Author Award Acceptance by Renée Watson

Courtesy NCAAP.

I know what it’s like to feel invisible.

This is strange because in a place like Oregon you’d think a plus-size girl like me, with dark brown skin and natural hair, would stand out. But, growing up in Portland, so many times my white friends would tell me they didn’t see me as black, saying, “You’re just a regular person to me.” Boys would say, “You’re cute…for a fat girl,” and some of my teachers seemed shocked that I was smart because they assumed that kids from my neighborhood weren’t capable, intelligent, and hardworking.

I wanted and needed all the pieces of me to be seen, without disclaimer. To erase one part of me was to erase all of me.

As a child, it was rare to read stories about kids growing up in the Pacific Northwest, and the books that existed were about white characters. My teachers taught about the Great Migration to the North, but I did not learn how African Americans arrived in the Pacific Northwest. I learned about Lewis and Clark, but never about York. I was taught about segregation in Alabama, lynchings in Mississippi, but not about Portland’s sundown laws. When I was in the fifth grade, skinheads beat an Ethiopian man to death with a baseball bat. Only one of my teachers talked about it in class.

I wanted to talk about all of it. I needed a space to process what was happening in my neighborhood, in my world.

This isn’t to say all of my childhood memories are painful. Having grown up in Portland means I know the beauty of Mt. Hood towering in my rearview mirror as I drive through the city. It means I know the sour taste of huckleberries and the smell of a marionberry cobbler baking in an oven. My house, my elementary school, and my church were all nestled in the black community. It felt like everyone knew each other — kids who grew up on the same block or just around the corner from each other also went to the same school, the same church. The wide sidewalks of our streets were perfect for racing; the tall pine trees just the right size to sneak behind during a game of hide-and-seek. We spent weekends in the summer camping in Bend, Oregon, and taking day-long excursions to Seaside Beach.

In my neighborhood, with my family and friends, black was beautiful and was not something to be ashamed of. It was not limited to black sorrow and hardship. Instead, blackness was nuanced. Blackness was joyful.

At home, I was taught to be proud that my mother’s Southern heritage and my father’s Jamaican roots ran through me. In our house, there was always a gospel, R&B, or reggae record spinning. Stories were passed down from one generation to the next about how, as a people, we survived slavery and Jim Crow, and how I came from a people who made a way out of no way.

In my neighborhood and in my home, I was seen. I was whole. But there was a constant chipping away when I stepped out into the larger world.

And so the question for me became, How do I remain whole in a world that seems like it wants to break me? How do I make sure the story of my people and our experience is not erased?

I think about our young girls growing up today and I wonder if they have the same questions. I wonder how the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements, the #BlackLivesMatter movement, and the call to #SayHerName are impacting what girls believe about their worth. How are they making sense of the world they inherited? Are they taught black history only through the lens of sorrow and pain? Are they allowed to be their whole selves and live at the intersection of their lives, not having to compartmentalize who they are at school, or in spaces that may not see them as whole beings? When the world chips away at their souls, breaks them into pieces because of racism, sexism, and classism, who will help them piece themselves back together?

In my life, women have been the ones to restore me, nurture me, and push me back out into the world, telling me to go and do what I was called to do. In our world, women have been the backbone of social change. Sometimes working behind the scenes, getting no credit. A lot of times working in plain sight and not getting any credit. Still, women do the work.

I want to acknowledge the women who have pieced me together again and again.

The first person who truly saw me was my mother, Carrie Watson. She listened to every story and poem I scribbled at seven and eight and nine years old. I’d interrupt her all the time saying, “Mommy, I have another poem. Want to hear it?” And she’d stop washing dishes or put the TV on mute and take in my words. She did not silence me because I was a child or because she was too busy. Her time and attention told me, I believe in you. You have something to say. Speak, child. Speak.

My sisters, Cheryl, Trisa, and Dyan, are lighthouses guiding me, always. To have sisters who are also your friends is a precious, precious gift. They know my shortcomings and my strengths. Their loyal support and care tell me, We love you unconditionally.

In high school, my English teachers Linda Christensen and Pam Hooten introduced me to myself through novels and poetry. We read Zora Neale Hurston and Lorraine Hansberry. We studied the poetry of Maya Angelou, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Lucille Clifton. In our English class, books were not just something to read for entertainment, not something to skim through just to be able to write a book report or pass a quiz. Books were the catalyst for debates and discussions and became essential to our growth as human beings. These writers validated my very existence. They testified for me, showing me how to make something of this black-girl life. They left word-maps on record, showing me how to survive. Their books tell me, We’ve been there; follow our example.

Day after day, the women of I, Too Arts Collective tell me by their actions, I am with you. I got you. They work alongside me to preserve and restore the Harlem brownstone where Langston Hughes lived and created during the last twenty years of his life. They saw me, trying to do what felt impossible, and they dreamed big with me. They give so much of their time to ensure that young people and emerging writers have a space to create and build on “Langston’s Legacy.”

I, Too Arts Collective founder Renée Watson at the Langston Hughes House. Photo: David Flores.

I am thankful for my sister-friends. They are the kind of friends that no matter where we are in a room whenever something funny or awkward is happening, our eyes meet and we don’t have to say a word. All we have to do is give each other the look. You know that look — the Do-you-see-what-I’m-seeing? look. The What-is-happening-right-now? look.

What my friends and I are really doing in those moments is looking for validation, for a witness. For someone to say, I feel you, I see.

I believe this is true for so many of us — especially our young people. They just want to know that we see them. That we see them beyond stereotypes and assumptions. That we see them like the seeds they are, full of potential if planted and nurtured in fertile ground. They need to be loved without condition, they need adults to listen to them, to really hear them. They need to hear, I am with you. I got you. Follow my example.

I am so grateful and proud to work in a field that is committed to creating work that uplifts and inspires children. We have been given the great responsibility to see young people, to say to them, Your story matters, there is a place for you in this world, in this school, in this library, in this book.

Thank you to every librarian and educator who handpicks a book for that one reader you know needs to read it. Thank you for making our stories visible through the book displays and the book talks you give, thank you for advocating for author visits and for diverse books to be in your communities. Please keep handing young people books that will challenge them, heal them. Stories that will make them laugh and cry and ask questions and take action. Let them travel the world in the stanzas of poems. Let them tell their own stories and discover what it means to be recorders, responders, rebukers, rejoicers, and rebuilders of their world.

Thank you to my editor, Sarah Shumway, and my team at Bloomsbury for your commitment to publishing work that centers black girlhood.

And thank you to the Coretta Scott King Book Awards Jury. For almost fifty years you have made the invisible visible. Thank you for shining a light on black boys and the joy of their sacred trips to barbershops. Thank you for being a witness to black children, like Will, who are grieving the loss of a murdered loved one and grappling with the desire for revenge. Thank you for seeing Starr and young people like her who are living in a world where they are questioning if their lives really matter, who are marching and protesting police brutality. Thank you for honoring Jade and girls who relate to Jade’s story, who have to piece themselves together and make something out of their sometimes broken lives. You bring visibility to black characters who are bold and brave, beautiful and brilliant.

Thank you for seeing us, for seeing me.

Renée Watson is the winner of the 2018 Coretta Scott King Author Award for Piecing Me Together, published by Bloomsbury Children’s Books. Her acceptance speech was delivered at the annual conference of the American Library Association in New Orleans on June 24, 2018. From the July/August 2018 issue of The Horn Book Magazine: Special Issue: ALA Awards. For more speeches, profiles, and articles click the tag ALA 2018.

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Profile of 2018 CSK Author Award winner Renée Watson

Renée Watson. Photo courtesy of the NAACP.

I was going to a gathering at Renée Watson’s apartment in Harlem, but I hadn’t met her before. I don’t like meeting new people, and I was a little worried that Renée might be all Mariah, coolly giving me “I don’t know her” vibes when I appeared on her doorstep.

Okay, no, I wasn’t really worried like that. Anyone who knew that the heartbeat of Renée’s picture book A Place Where Hurricanes Happen began in the poetry workshops she did with children in New Orleans after Katrina, or that Harlem’s Little Blackbird, about singer and performer Florence Mills, wasn’t so much about Mills’s talent as it was about how she “used her fame and fortune to help others” — anyone who knew Renée’s writing would know that she wouldn’t be petty.

And she wasn’t. I was the first to arrive at the gathering, with my black-eyed pea salad instead of my usual homemade sweets. (I was trying to seem healthy, and it was a B. Smith recipe — she’d never steered me wrong.) Renée welcomed me in, and within minutes, I’d made myself right at home. Because Renée always makes room.

* * *

May the places you call home nurture, inspire, and heal you.
—Renée Watson

I wonder what Portland looks like from the sky. Up there, rolling hills watch over the City of Roses, and the Fremont Bridge canopies over drivers coming and going from east to west. Up there it is just a normal winter day. In those clouds there are no traces of racial slurs being shouted in school halls, and the dust from the newly constructed buildings hasn’t risen that far.
—This Side of Home

Renée’s novel This Side of Home was published soon after we met. And I devoured it, seeing my hybrid self, my twenty-first-century daughter, my Jamaican mother, and my global aunties all in this lyrical story of sisterhood, community, and heritage, of power and transformation. A story set in Portland, Oregon. I’d never been, and had no desire to go. As much as I loved Beezus and Ramona Quimby as well as some craft bloggers who made the city seem a haven for all who love handmade, I was equally wary of the Portlandia-ness of it all. But This Side of Home made me think I could give it a try, take a road trip there one day. Renée’s full-bodied story made me whisper “why not?” to myself. She made me think that I could find moments of home in a place where I’d assumed I would not be welcome. Her writing always makes me think that if there is trouble, beauty also will be there.

Renée never seems stressed, though I know she must be, sometimes. She is a black woman, after all. But she is not one to be frantic or frenzied. Sometimes Renée reminds me of a living Solange album. She is unapologetically black in a way that understands all of the beauty and power and nuance those words mean when you lovingly claim them. If she blesses your heart, that’s exactly, literally, what she means to do. And it’s what she does every day.

* * *

For me, one of my current inspirations is Renée Watson. Besides being a brilliant poet/writer she’s also the quiet force that saved Langston’s house, turning it into a space to honor him and our literary traditions.
—Jason Reynolds

One day in 2016, we got together and walked through Langston Hughes’s unoccupied Harlem brownstone, where he’d spent the last twenty years of his life. (I’d walked past it countless times, feeling a vague sense of self-pity because I, who loved Langston’s work, couldn’t get inside. Feeling annoyed that “somebody” wasn’t doing something to turn this place into a museum.) His typewriter sat on a mantle; some of his papers were strewn about casually, as though he’d just left the room to get us some snacks. The power and joy and music of the Harlem Renaissance whispered through the dusty but majestic and elegant rooms as Renée spoke quietly of her dream to open the home to a community of writers and artists and teachers and learners; to preserve and renew the spirit that had been, to encourage new ones to bloom. Her plans did not strike me as unrealistic, idealistic, or egoistic — they were big plans that considered small details; that came from an infinitely generous heart. Now I, Too Arts Collective is real, and through those visits, through donations of time, money, and energy, it is more than a museum. [See sidebar.] I’ve been in the house when people visit, from all over the world, and have watched them take deep and wide breaths, knowing that they’ve come home. Renée is that “somebody” who reminds us that we are, too.

* * *

To be seen — truly seen — is to feel that all parts of who I am are recognized not as compartmentalized pieces of myself, but blended truths of my identity.

I hope that my books provide space for young people to explore, and say, “Yeah, I feel seen.”
—Renée Watson

I lean into Renée’s words when I read them, take a trust-fall into her stories. I know I’ll be all right. Once, we met for coffee and I somehow managed to simultaneously fall out of my seat and knock over my water glass. I could not have done better if I had had years of training in the art of physical comedy. We laughed (and I marveled at the restraint of the guy sitting across from me who barely looked up from his laptop and didn’t crack the tiniest smile — I kept checking), and I didn’t feel the need to immediately perform another me to erase the memory of that fantastically clumsy one. I could just be, because even in small moments and ways, Renée doesn’t let the danger of the single story dominate the day. She tells vibrant, robust stories that honor pain and celebrate joy.

* * *

I tell students that sometimes you’re going to be really comfortable and other times you’re not going to want to share anything. You’re going to have to push yourself.
—Renée Watson

I wasn’t even going to open What Momma Left Me. There are limits to friendship, after all, and it looked like a Dead Mother Book, and I had a policy against those.

When I was younger, Momma read me bedtime stories. I always wanted her to skip to the end so I could know what would happen. Especially if there was a scary scene. I wanted to make sure that the characters would be okay. Momma would say, “You can’t truly enjoy a happy ending if you skip through all the bad parts.”
—What Momma Left Me

I’d forgotten that Renée wouldn’t leave me hanging. I’d forgotten that she teaches the whole child of any age, that she works to both transform and be transformed. That she tells her students, “We’re going to talk about your joy and your pain. We’re going to celebrate, we’re going to find something to praise, we’re going to critique things, ask questions of the world, and make some demands on the world to be a better place.” In much the same way that Chloe x Halle moves smoothly from I could be a warrior to Yes, I am a warrior, Renée Watson’s work moves us through questions and answers and back again.

I’d forgotten that even when Renée’s books make me cry, I cry tears that also remind me that I’ll laugh again, that make me think that maybe I can close my eyes and taste the sun. That her stories make demands on her readers and challenge us, that she sees and respects us, that she might grow your heart and change your mind, all the while letting you know that you are also okay, just as you are.

* * *

Sometimes I just want to be comfortable in this skin, this body. Want to cock my head back and laugh loud and free, all my teeth showing, and not be told I’m too rowdy, too ghetto. Sometimes I just want to go to school, wearing my hair big like cumulus clouds without getting any special attention, without having to explain why it looks different from the day before. Why it might look different tomorrow. Sometimes I just want to let my tongue speak the way it pleases, let it be untamed and not bound by rules.

Maxine is right and wrong. Those girls are not the opposite of me. We are perpendicular. We may be on different paths, yes. But there’s a place where we touch, where we connect and are just the same.
—Piecing Me Together

We can laugh together, cry together, be together, and repeat the cycle, sometimes in a different order. Renée Watson is an award-winning author. She is a poet, a performer, a revolutionary, a nurturer, a dreamer, a story-teller, a friend. She manages to have her feet firmly planted on the ground while her words lift us up beyond the skies. About her work she has said, “One thing that I hope resonates with young readers is the power of one’s voice. I hope young people close the book asking, ‘What can my voice do?’” I congratulate you, Renée, on winning this award for Piecing Me Together that honors the legacy of Coretta Scott King, “for her courage and determination to continue the work for peace and world brotherhood.” But even more than that, I thank you. Thank you for reminding readers that we can have that same courage and determination, that we can take risks and still be loved, that we can love and be in pain, and still experience deep joy, with all our teeth showing. For letting us pick up the fragments of ourselves through story, fling them up to the heavens, and gather them up again, rearranged, revised, but still all of a piece. For reminding us that we are able to decide what our voices can do, and how gorgeously powerful we can be in our own skin, just as we are — because of who we are. Thank you.

Renée Watson at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Photo courtesy of The Schomburg Center.

I, Too Arts Collective

In 2016, Renée Watson launched a crowdfunding campaign using the hashtag #LangstonsLegacy, earning enough in thirty days to lease Langston Hughes’s Harlem brownstone. It now houses I, Too Arts Collective, named for one of Hughes’s best-known poems. Through creative writing for teens, monthly poetry salons, and an author conversation series, I, Too Arts Collective nurtures voices from underrepresented communities in the creative arts and provides programming for emerging writers. Visit itooarts.com.

From the July/August 2018 issue of The Horn Book Magazine: Special Issue: ALA Awards. For more speeches, profiles, and articles click the tag ALA 2018.

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