All Interviews

Tia Williams has the range

If you asked romance author Tia Williams what her favorite genre is, you might be surprised to learn it is horror. In fact, she once took a yearlong class on Dracula, taking an interest in the mythology of immortality and the fearsome, seductive title character. Williams chuckles as she says, “I’d love to write [a horror novel], but it always comes out as a romance when I sit down.”

A Love Song for Ricki Wilde is Williams’ fourth contemporary romance, and while it’s filled with her trademark balance of sexy love story and emotional moments both beautiful and tragic, there’s something new here: a full-bodied embrace of the fantastical and the serendipitous. Williams describes A Love Song for Ricki Wilde as a “modern fairytale,” one that adheres to Williams’ own preferences as a fantasy fan who focuses more on characters than rules; Ricki Wilde never gets bogged down into the hows and whys of world building. “I like ‘Game of Thrones’ because despite the dragons, it feels very much like The Godfather,” she explains. She notes one of her other major inspirations is Jude Deveraux’s iconic 1989 time-travel romance, A Knight in Shining Armor, where a heartbroken woman ends up centuries back in time.

“Readers have to feel safe and that’s something I think about with every sentence.”

The titular character doesn’t fit in with the rest of her family, an Atlanta clan that runs a string of successful funeral homes. “Death bums Ricki out,” Williams says. She has no desire to step into the family business and feels universes away from her socialite siblings. So Ricki instead chooses to strike out on her own, move to Harlem and open up a floral boutique, adorably and aptly named Wilde Things. As Ricki puts down roots, a cast of fascinating characters orbits around her. There is Ms. Della, an elegant nonagenarian who offers Ricki a place to rent in her brownstone; Tuesday, a tenacious former child star who becomes Ricki’s new friend; and Ezra, Ricki’s love interest, a mysterious and sensitive man with a gift for music. When asked what would serve as the soundtrack for this book, Williams says with a smile, “A lot of Prince. Specifically ‘God,’ which is mainly an instrumental.” Coincidentally—or perhaps not—a framed image of Prince and Vanity’s 1983 Rolling Stone cover hangs on the wall above her head as we speak.

A Love Song for Ricki Wilde allowed Williams to explore and research not just pop music but also flowers and fragrance, voodoo practices and spirituality, many of which are interests the author already enjoyed. Ezra’s devotion to art and culture was inspired by Williams’ own love of music: She once owned a Billboard book on popular songs and would go page by page, learning everything she could about each hit and how it was made. Ricki’s tender care for her delicate plants and appreciation of their exotic, complex fragrances echoes Williams’ former career as a beauty editor and writer. “I remember discovering all these different kinds of flowers and their scents,” she says. “I had no idea night-blooming jasmine existed and what that smelled like.” However, her biggest research focus was 1920s Harlem.

Book jacket image for A Love Song for Ricki Wilde by Tia Williams

“I love the 1920s era: Hollywood, the Lost Generation in Paris, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes,” she says, and Williams includes flashbacks to this fascinating time in Harlem’s history alongside the present-day scenes. These additions create a rich sense of place, filled with Williams’ admiration for not only Harlem’s community and cultural renaissance, but also the ways art and activism provide solace and fuel resistance in the wake of devastating waves of racial violence. In Ricki Wilde, Williams writes, “What you haven’t reckoned with, you’re doomed to repeat. America was a ghost story with no end.” Shifting back and forth between the past and present, Williams shows the violence that’s been perpetuated against Black people and their communities. “American history and its causes do not exist in a vacuum and there’s a lot of generational trauma,” she says, but notes that even in the midst of hopelessness, there is love. It’s a dichotomy echoed in the book’s balance between life and death. Because Ricki’s been surrounded by death for most of her life, she seeks to offset it by tending to and nurturing her plants; Ms. Della possesses both the satisfaction of a life well-lived and the spirit to keep going.

That complexity, that sense of the fullness of life is also present in Ezra and Ricki’s relationship, which begins with a magnetic attraction but deepens as they, in Willliams’ words, get “lost in the soft, beautiful things”; their love grows through creating and experiencing art. Williams’ own work has already inspired adaptations, with The Perfect Find being made into a Netflix film last year starring Gabrielle Union and Keith Powers. Should Ricki Wilde get an opportunity to make the leap from book to screen, Williams thinks that KiKi Layne would make a good Ricki, especially given her performance in If Beale Street Could Talk. Actress Zazie Beetz is also a contender, as Williams says her more bohemian style would help bring Ricki to life. As for an on-screen Ezra, it’s no contest: The quiet, commanding presence of John David Washington is Williams’ pick.

A Love Song for Ricki Wilde has more twists than a well-versed romance reader might expect. Both the shift in genre and the obstacles Ricki and Ezra face (which we refuse to spoil), require a lot of faith in Williams. Readers may at first think they’ve mistakenly picked up a historical fiction novel, not a contemporary romance, and they may wonder how Williams is going to pull off that coveted happily ever after. One thing, however, is for certain: ears will be shed, whether from Williams’ evocative, emotional writing or how Ricki and Ezra realize they’ve found the person who truly understands them, all the way down to their bones. Williams hopes people will trust her all the way to the end. “There’s a genre rule when it comes to romance. Of course, readers might not know how an author is going to get there, but there will be a HEA. Readers have to feel safe and that’s something I think about with every sentence,” she says.

Read our starred review of ‘A Love Song for Ricki Wilde’ by Tia Williams.

There’s a lovely moment in the book where Tuesday is desperately trying to figure out who she is outside of her past life as an actor. She thinks writing a memoir might be her next career move, but it’s not quite igniting her passions. “Maybe you were a memoirist,” Ezra says. “But identity changes all the time, I’ve found. There’s a few more ‘yous’ you haven’t met yet.” Growth and change are central to Ricki Wilde, whether it’s the passing of time or the courage to pursue a dream. And in talking with Williams, it’s clear there are many “hers”—the Prince fan, the history buff, the beauty writer, the fantasy reader—that overlap and intersect, contributing to the fertile soil from which A Love Song for Ricki Wilde was able to blossom. But what about the other versions of Tia Williams that readers haven’t met yet? The heightened, magical world of Ricki Wilde is a brave and exciting step toward something new. Maybe, horror novelist is next. Or perhaps just, as she suggests, “damn good storyteller.”

Photo of Tia Williams by Francesco Ferendeles.

A Love Song for Ricki Wilde is a magical, surprising change of pace for the Seven Days in June author.

Children's & YA Picture Book Children's

Reaching out across the world

As a child, author-illustrator Jenny Sue Kostecki-Shaw was so shy that she didn’t want anyone else to see what she was drawing. “I was either in a cardboard box or in the closet—that’s where my studio was, and I would just draw all the time,” she remembers, speaking over Zoom from her home studio in the mountains of North Central New Mexico, where she lives with her husband and two children.

Now, Kostecki-Shaw no longer hides her creative talents and instead uses art to foster communication and friendships around the globe. Like You, Like Me, her latest book, was inspired by a pen pal relationship between her daughter, Tulsi, and a slightly younger girl in Tanzania, Vanessa. Kostecki-Shaw has been homeschooling her son and daughter for nine years, and she used letter writing as a skill-building exercise. Her children wrote not only to her, but also to their cousins and neighbors. They even kept little mailboxes in the woods. Later, Tulsi wrote to authors she liked, and eventually, she asked for a pen pal. One of Kostecki-Shaw’s friends—a librarian at an international school—helped Tulsi and Vanessa connect.

Read our starred review of Like You, Like Me.

The girls gave Kostecki-Shaw approval to use their names in the book. “They were pretty excited,” she reports. Kostecki-Shaw’s vibrant, torn-paper collage art shows the girls communicating from across the world, discussing the details of their lives: ponderosa pines, African drumming, red-tailed hawks and cheetahs.

A number of spreads feature each girl side-by-side on their own page, mirroring the other in creative ways and making it easy for readers to notice the similarities and differences between their two worlds. About midway through the book, Tulsi looks at a flicker feather that she wants to share with her friend. Kostecki-Shaw says, “I just tilted Tulsi’s head up, and thought, maybe this is a point where they could actually look at each other, even theoretically.” In the finished spread, the flicker feather picked up by Tulsi magically appears on a beach in front of Vanessa, as she holds onto a shell that appears in Tulsi’s possession in the next spread. “It almost feels like they’re in the same place,” Kostecki-Shaw says, “even though the backgrounds are different. From this point on, they’re looking at each other.” Like You, Like Me, she says, is a book about “coming together and sharing more and more.”

Like You, Like Me is a companion to Kostecki-Shaw’s earlier book, Same, Same but Different, which is also about two pen pals: Elliot in the United States, and Kailash in India. As a child, Kostecki-Shaw had a pen pal in Belgium, and for the last 15 years, she’s had an adult pen pal from France. “She once sent me a small hand-sewn envelope with fine red earth clay from where she was born in France,” Kostecki-Shaw says, “and I sent her flicker feathers and a tiny clay flicker bird I made. That’s where the inspiration came from for Vanessa and Tulsi sharing the shell and feather.”

“I love just sharing the inspiration that comes from connections with people you meet around the world, whether it’s through traveling or pen pals, or however you meet them.”

Kostecki-Shaw grew up in St. Louis, and her global curiosity was initially ignited by her father, who traveled often and widely for his work—the basis for her book, Papa Brings Me the World. “I remember just wanting to go with him, to see all those places,” she says. Her first book, My Travelin’ Eye, was inspired by difficulties with a lazy eye, which made learning to read a struggle. “I loved stories so much, and I loved books,” she recalls, “so I would copy all the art and ask everyone to read to me. I loved that books showed me other places to go.”

As an adult, after working for a number of years as an artist for Hallmark cards, she traveled to Nepal and taught English, and she also spent about five months in India. “Before I wrote Same, Same but Different,” she explains, “my life looked so much like Elliot’s. And now my life looks a lot like Kailash’s in some ways. It’s much more connected to nature. We live on a little homestead and we have goats and chickens and ducks, and we’re just a little bit more rooted in community.”

Several years ago, she and her family built her art studio themselves, with the help of a builder friend. “It was so empowering to me as a woman and as an artist to create my own space,” she says. Like You, Like Me is the first project she’s completed in that space, and she relished being able to spread out while creating collages with hand-painted papers and oil sticks. “It just felt so freeing. I would cover surfaces and just paint papers for days, making all kinds of patterns,” she says. “I was thinking a lot about the seasons and nature here in New Mexico, and the color palettes of photos from Tanzania, and looking at patterns that would show up in the ocean, leaves and flowers there.”

She uses a variety of techniques to add texture. “Texture is one of my favorite things. In addition to carving and stamping shapes,” she continues, “I printed with rubber bands and miscellaneous small objects, splattered wet paint and scratched dry paint with an old raggedy paintbrush. I made textures by pushing and pulling paint blobs around with a small piece of chipboard and a brayer, and I printed patterns with oil sticks. Basically, kindergarten play.”

As a child, she feared writing: “Even now, I have to face that little bit of fear of writing until I get far enough into the story where everything fades away, and I’m just having fun in the story and making art.” Now, as an author-illustrator, Kostecki-Shaw loves being able to simultaneously adjust both words and art, letting them “just dance together until they find their way.” She adds, “I love just sharing the inspiration that comes from connections with people you meet around the world, whether it’s through traveling or pen pals, or however you meet them. They just open you up to new ways and make your life so much more beautiful, whether through a conversation or an experience. My life has definitely gotten a lot more beautiful because of people I’ve met.”

Jenny Sue Kostecki-Shaw conveys the joy of fostering international friendships through the vividly textured Like You, Like Me.

Nonfiction History European History

Natalie Haynes brings the unsung women of the ancient world to life

In Divine Might: Goddesses in Greek Myth, Natalie Haynes shoves aside the male-centric lens through which we’ve long viewed goddesses like Aphrodite, Demeter and Artemis, whether in history, literature, art or music. She steps into that breach armed with a sharpened gaze and copious research as she reveals to readers how these otherworldly women have been misrepresented and misunderstood in the past, and explores the ways in which they inspire and inform us in the present. BookPage asked the acclaimed author/scholar/comedian/broadcaster about her fascinating career and what she thinks we can all learn from the undersung women of the ancient world.

In last year’s Pandora’s Jar, you brought the likes of Medusa and Jocasta to the forefront. And now in this book, you turn to the goddesses in all their power and glory. What drives you to interrogate and explore how women were portrayed in myth and in art?

I can’t imagine not being interested in the portrayal of women: We’re half the world! And since almost all literature and art that survives to us from the ancient world is by men, it provides a fascinating canvas to explore. How did men imagine women, and how did they imagine powerful women, when they knew no such people in real life? What kind of goddesses would these men worship? I really wanted to explore the goddesses, the temples built to them, the stories depicting them, the art embodying them. So that is how Divine Might happened.

What was the most surprising, challenging and/or gratifying thing you discovered in the course of your research, in terms of seeing echoes of the ancient past in our present society and culture? Do you now have a favorite goddess?

The most challenging thing I discovered was just how little impact the goddess Hestia—once central to worship of all the gods in ancient Greece—had made on the modern world. There were so few examples of her in contemporary fiction and art that at the beginning of her chapter, I wasn’t sure I would be able to write it at all. But it turned out to be a really beautiful process, finding her where I could, and trying to explain how and why she had disappeared. I don’t have favorites—I change my mind with every chapter!

“Female anger is frightening to men. Always.”

Artemis may well be the most widely known goddess, with loads of mentions of her female-archer guise in ancient art and current pop culture. But while her strength and skill are routinely celebrated, you assert that at her core, “She is a true predator . . . fixed on death.” Will you share a bit more about what you found to be the most intriguing contradictions in terms of how Artemis has been portrayed and viewed?

Book jacket image for Divine Might by Natalie Haynes

I’m interested that Artemis is such a popular goddess here! I always assume Aphrodite/Venus must be the best known, just because of the sheer cultural penetration (and a planet named after her too.). Artemis is a puzzle because she is syncretized with so many other goddesses: every area in the Greek world seems to have known her by a different name and worshiped a different aspect of her. This is how you end up with a goddess who protects young girls, but also shoots and kills them, and a virgin goddess who is closely linked with the goddess of childbirth. I think it’s appropriate that she is so hard to pin down, though. Artemis belongs to the places away from cities and towns: She is a goddess of wild places, forests and mountains. We don’t really belong in her world; she is most at home with wild creatures. So we either accept we can’t understand her, or we become a little wild ourselves.

What differences do you see in art created by men versus women?

I think the more women make art, the more we’ll see different interpretations of what it means to be a woman. I was thinking about it today reading a review of Britney Spears’ new book: How she chooses to present herself seems completely different from how her management/family chose to present her when they controlled so much of her life. There’s a terrible poignancy to how long she has had to wait to be allowed to be her full self. And—more cheeringly—look at the Taylor Swift juggernaut. She remakes herself with each album, sometimes more than once. It’s a master class in depicting powerful womanhood in hugely varied ways. She’s inspiring millions of girls as she does it, so I think we could be in for an exciting time ahead.

You describe in colorfully unflinching detail some of Hera’s “spectacular and creatively unpleasant revenges.” And you note that modern culture often turns this exasperation into fodder for comedy rather than, say, a reasonable explanation for rage. Why do you think—even in myths that spoke plainly about murder, rape and other terrible things—Hera’s and other goddesses’ anger was assiduously avoided and downplayed?

“. . . women’s stories are every bit as valuable and compelling as men’s, every bit as important as I believe them to be.”

Female anger is frightening to men. Always. And it’s much easier to deny that if you claim that it’s irrational, that it comes out of nowhere, that it’s the consequence of being crazy or cruel. Otherwise you’d have to accept that structural inequality is irritating and make an effort to change it for the better. Sometimes I feel like Bruce Banner in The Avengers: “That’s my secret, Captain. I’m always angry.” He doesn’t wait for an alien invasion to be mad, he lives there. Well, me too.

Your first book, The Ancient Guide to Modern Life, was published in 2010, and you’ve since written several books—fiction and nonfiction—that challenge our assumptions about the ancient world. Have you met with any pushback to the new perspectives you’ve offered? How has your work and your life as an author changed since your first book?

I am told by academic friends that I am generally appreciated in their profession for encouraging so many students to pursue classics and ancient history. I’ve no doubt there are some scholars who hate me—that’s just a statistical reality—but I can’t honestly say I give them a moment’s thought. Who has the time?

Comedy + classicism is a pairing that’s worked quite well for you, to say the least! Which came first? When were you first inspired to combine the two? Does your BBC podcast “Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics” inform your books and vice versa?

Ha—I guess I would say I was funny before I was a classicist, but I was a classicist before I was a comedian. I started doing stand-up during my undergrad years. Since then the two have swirled around me most of the time, I suppose. The first few years in comedy were pretty low on classics (not much call for jokes on the ancient world in the late ’90s comedy circuit). But now these two fields have really merged for me. I love doing the live shows and making the BBC podcast. I’m extremely lucky!

What are you most hoping readers take away from this book?

I’m hoping that readers will come away from the book thinking that women’s stories are every bit as valuable and compelling as men’s, every bit as important as I believe them to be. I hope they’ll have a newfound respect for the huge power of these goddesses and the centrality of their role in the ancient world.

Is there anything you’d like to share about what’s next for you, goddess-y or otherwise?

Next up is season 10 of the podcast, I’ll be recording it in the spring. Still choosing who to include. And the new novel is about Medea, so that is going to be an intense time, writing her. But I wrote my dissertation on Euripides’ portrayal of Medea and Hecabe, so I have been squaring up to take on this story for decades. It feels like now is the time. Let’s hope I’m right.

Photo of Natalie Haynes by James Betts

Read our review of Divine Might.

The author-comedian discusses women’s stories, Taylor Swift, female rage and her new history of Greek mythology, Divine Might.

Fiction Historical Fiction

Shining light on a forgotten story of WWII

As Derek B. Miller sat down to write his seventh novel, The Curse of Pietro Houdini, something magical happened. “I wrote a great first sentence that somehow embedded the whole book,” he says, speaking from his home in Spain. “This is the only time this has ever happened to me.”

Miller had already chosen the setting for this spellbinding historical saga—a Benedictine abbey near Montecassino, Italy, during World War II. In 1944, American pilots dropped more bombs on this hilltop sanctuary than any other single building, mistakenly believing it to be occupied by German forces. While stories abound about the invasion of Normandy, few Americans are familiar with this military operation.
“I have a Ph.D. in international relations,” Miller notes, “and I didn’t know about it.” Part of the reason, he explains, is that “it’s just not a good old-fashioned American hero story. The battle went on for months and months and killed a lot of people.” What’s more, the abbey had been housing thousands of irreplaceable manuscripts and art, sent there for safekeeping in 1943. Thankfully, night after night, a German and an Austrian officer, with the help of the monks, loaded this treasure trove into carts and moved it to Rome before the Allied destruction began—a secretive mission described in his book. “I don’t think an abbey has called out to have its own story since The Name of the Rose,” Miller adds, referring to Umberto Eco’s famed murder mystery.

“I just love big, opinionated, risk-taking, take-no-prisoners central characters.”

Miller was introduced to the Montecassino abbey while working on a previous novel, Radio Life, which was inspired by the acclaimed 1959 science fiction classic A Canticle for Leibowitz, a post-apocalyptic story about monks who protect books during nuclear war and its aftermath by hiding them in an abbey. The book’s author, Walter J. Miller (no relation) was a radioman and tail gunner whose role in the Montecassino abbey bombing left him with post-traumatic stress disorder and undoubtedly inspired Canticle. Now, Derek Miller wanted to explore the setting of the abbey itself, but he was having trouble deciding what story he wanted to tell. “This isn’t nonfiction,” Miller says. “I didn’t want to be an academic. I wanted to be a dramatist. And I wanted to find the story within the story that could be mine.”

The plot finally began to emerge when Miller wrote that first sentence—“Pietro Houdini claimed that life clung to him like a curse and if he could escape it he would.” Instantaneously, one of the novel’s two main characters sprang into focus. As his name implies, Houdini is a larger-than-life character who may not be what he claims to be: a “master artist and confidant of the Vatican.” “I just love big, opinionated, risk-taking, take-no-prisoners central characters,” Miller says.

“Once the name popped out,” Miller continues, “once I had Houdini and a curse, and the abbey all sort of there, I realized that interrogating the curse mattered. And I was wondering who else was there? Who was he talking to? Who would care about something like that?” Before long, Miller envisioned an orphaned 14-year-old—Massimo—whom Pietro finds lying battered and beaten in a gutter. The two walk up the hill to the abbey, setting into motion a vibrant, well-crafted tale that’s rich in history, drama, intrigue, tragedy and well-placed doses of humor—at which Miller excels. Ultimately, he has created a story about both the heroics and the horrors of war, as well as the powerful bonds that can form in the midst of calamity.

Massimo’s first-person narration convincingly guides the book, and it is framed by an introduction and conclusion written from Massimo’s adult perspective decades later. “When I’m writing,” Miller explains, “I really have no idea what’s going to happen next. I only had milestones and a chronology [of historical events] that I decided to stick to seriously, partly because I’m a scholar.” Many readers, in fact, may be reminded of Anthony Doerr’s beloved World War II novel, All the Light We Cannot See. “This is going to sound shocking,” Miller says, “but I haven’t read it yet.”

Similarly surprising comparisons were made after the publication of his award-winning novel, Norwegian by Night: People complimented him on doing such a wonderful job writing Scandinavian crime. “I said, ‘That’s interesting, I’ve never heard of it.’ I thought I was writing a story about an old Jewish guy running through the woods in Norway. But apparently, it was part of an entire genre that I was unaware of, even though I was living in Norway at the time.”

“I haven’t really written love stories as such—you know, boy-meets-girl, that kind of thing. But there is, very much with Pietro and Massimo, love.”

Both Norwegian by Night and The Curse of Pietro Houdini feature an adult and child paired as main characters. “A lot of my books are really quite multigenerational,” Miller says. “It gives me tremendous scope for wisdom, dialogue, humor, misunderstanding and competing interpretations. And it’s fun, because old people being frustrated with young people, and young people being frustrated with old people is just hilarious.”

Miller also describes the pairing as a “useful literary device,” saying, “It’s always helpful for somebody in the know to have somebody to talk to who’s not in the know for the benefit of the reader. And in my books, there’s a lot going on.” Such a marvelous embarrassment of riches is certainly the case in The Curse of Pietro Houdini, in which many of Pietro’s discussions of art, history and the war with Massimo serve as vital backstory provided in an entertaining fashion. Miller points to the power of the connection that these characters establish, saying, “Being alone and then finding someone to connect with in the midst of that loneliness is essential in the human experience. I haven’t really written love stories as such—you know, boy-meets-girl, that kind of thing. But there is, very much with Pietro and Massimo, love.”

“Writing is a full-contact blood sport,” Miller concludes. “It’s a crazy way to make a living—almost an impossible way.” He started trying his hand at fiction during a number of unscheduled months spent waiting for his Ph.D. program to begin in Switzerland, and he continued with the craft alongside his studies. He eventually published his third manuscript, Norwegian by Night, in 2008, after 12 years of writing. That book came together when he elevated Sheldon Horowitz, who had been a minor character in a draft manuscript, to a central character. He turned out to be such a wonderful personality that Miller later wrote a prequel about his childhood, the suspenseful tragicomedy How to Find Your Way in the Dark.

Now Miller is working on a book set in the late 1950s on the coast of Spain, where Salvador Dali had his house in Cadaqués. Miller and his family live about an hour south of Barcelona, after living and working in Norway for a number of years (Miller’s wife is Norwegian). “I needed a change and it’s an adventure for the kids,” he says. “Life is short, so you take some bold decisions, if you’re so inclined.”

At some point, Miller hopes to finally visit the Montecassino abbey, which has been rebuilt since the World War II bombing. He says, “My deep, deep hope is that I can get The Curse of Pietro Houdini translated into Italian and that I have an excellent reason to go.”

Read our starred review of The Curse of Pietro Houdini.

Author photo by Camilla Waszink.

Derek B. Miller returns with a captivating historical tale centered on a pivotal yet rarely told episode of WWII: the bombing of the abbey of Montecassino, Italy. When a mysterious master artist, or possibly master con artist, and a 14-year-old orphan take shelter in the abbey, they are drawn into the mission to save precious art stored there from destruction. The adventure that ensues is tragic, funny and thrilling, with plenty of sleight of hand and even more heart.

Children's & YA YA Fiction YA

Gene Luen Yang and LeUyen Pham on teamwork

LeUyen Pham arrives early and is already telling stories as we wait for Gene Luen Yang to hop on the call. Laughing, she explains, “You get the right people in the right space, and we’ll entertain you, no matter what.” She’s talking about our conversation, which took place over Zoom, but she could just as easily be talking about her forthcoming graphic novel with Yang, Lunar New Year Love Story. Though they’ve been friends for years, this is the first project they’ve worked on together, and the collaboration was seamless. Pham describes their process as being “like two friends in class, exchanging notes.”

As soon as Gene joins us, each artist can’t stop singing the praises of the other. It’s Pham who points out that Yang has just been honored with what he calls “a fancy award in Oklahoma,” which the rest of us would call the NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s and Young Adult Literature (Pham was also a nominee for the prize this year).

Read our starred review of Lunar New Year Love Story.

Of Pham, Yang says, “She can draw in multiple styles and do them all incredibly well. And because she comes from picture books, she has a painterly quality in her artwork.” According to Yang, sometimes picture book artists making the jump to comics struggle with the stamina required: “There’s just way more pictures in a graphic novel. But I think Uyen has mutant powers. She is shockingly fast.” What might take a comics artist years to draw, Pham completed in under eight months—including the coloring, a task many artists hire out. Yang quips, “There’s a saying in comics that to have a career, you just have to be two of the three: good, fast or nice. So I’ve told Uyen she can stop being nice now.”

Lunar New Year Love Story started from what its title suggests: a love story, and one close to Yang’s heart. When he and his wife of 23 years began dating, she hated Valentine’s Day, seeing it as a corporate scam. But, he explains, “I really liked her, so my workaround for that was to celebrate the Lunar New Year in a very Valentines-y way.” Noting the frequent overlap between the two holidays, he turned to love-themed Lunar New Year cards and presents, and from there, the tale of Lunar New Year Love Story’s protagonist, Val (short for Valentina), was born.

Val also hates Valentine’s Day, but when growing up, she loved it. Her imaginary friend, who plays a considerable role in this graphic novel, was St. Valentine himself (Val calls him St. V.). Though Yang wrote the manuscript, the book was truly a collaborative effort. Pham explains the many ways Yang invited her into the story, asking about her first love or her imaginary friends, and including components of her answers in the narrative. “It’s not very often that you have such a generous writer, but Gene has no ego, and somewhere along the way, it went from being Gene’s story to kind of meshing together.”

“Once you have the familiar, you can weave in the unfamiliar.”

Yang agrees: “I’ve collaborated with other artists, but this project is the one where there was the most bleed over in terms of responsibilities.” Pham insists on the greatness of Yang’s original manuscript (which, she says, he drew out entirely) and the incredible timeliness of it: “I had just gone to Milkwood (Sophie Blackall’s farm/creative retreat), and I was seeing these tremendous artists producing tremendous work, and everything changed for me. I came home and realized I didn’t have the heart for the project I had been working on.” Canceling that project made it possible for Pham to consider Yang’s book when it arrived. “It fell in my hands right at the moment when I needed something to fill the soul. That sounds really corny, and I don’t know how else to put it. I was looking for a soul-feeder, something I could put a lot of myself into.”

Pham did put a lot of herself into Lunar New Year Love Story, including her background and ethnicity. Yan knew he wanted “to tell a story about a Pan-Asian community, because that kind of community has been important to me.” The two explain that they had a number of conversations about Val’s possible ethnicity, before landing on Vietnamese. “That was the culture I understood and could communicate the best,” says Pham. When she first read the character of Val’s grandmother, “there was an immediate familiarity in her voice, and I thought, ‘I know exactly who this woman is, and I know exactly how I’m going to draw her.’ . . . It was all just my mom.”

Family is an incredibly important part of Lunar New Year Love Story, with Val having to navigate the changes in her relationship with her dad and their volatile history. But it’s the love story that drives most of the narrative as Val tries to figure out if she’s doomed to never find true love. When she meets Les at the Lunar New Year festival, she starts to hope, giving herself a year to prove it’s possible. Along the way, she has to deal with Les’s rude cousin Jae, who turns out to complicate matters more than Val ever expected. Yang notes that they “purposefully tried to hit all of the romcom structure.” But Yang and Pham didn’t rest there. “Once you hit that skeleton, it lets you play with a bunch of stuff. Once you have the familiar, you can weave in the unfamiliar.”

For some readers, that unfamiliar might come in the form of the traditional lion dance that Val falls in love with, or the intermingling of Chinese and Korean and Vietnamese cultures, or even the references to Catholic saints and other aspects of the Christian church. When asked if it has ever felt controversial to include issues of faith, or if he’s been cautioned against writing about faith in his books, Yang replies, “In college, I had an amazing creative writing professor who once told me, ‘You should never write about your faith.’ She was a Romanian American and a practicing Buddhist, and I was a Chinese American practicing Catholic. Instead, she said, “Live your faith, and if your faith is part of your life, it will come out in your writing.”

Agreeing, Pham says, “There’s the stadium in which these dialogues are played out in public, and then there’s people’s private lives. And this story takes place in private lives, not in a public stadium. I prefer stories at that level, where we’re simply showing what life is.” She echoes that thought when speaking about ethnicity: “I like that the story is just a story that happens to have Asian characters in it. It has a universality to it.”

From family and friendships to religion and culture, Lunar New Year Love Story is a romcom that looks at the deeper aspects of life. Pham took an incredibly thoughtful approach to the novel’s colors: “We made the book into 12 chapters, representing each month of the year. Each month has a theme, which corresponds to a different color on the feng shui wheel. Everything connects with a meaning.” Yang adds: “There are five elements in Asian cosmology, and each of those is associated with a color, each associated with different parts of society and culture. So what Uyen did was she took this old, old philosophy and applied it here, and even if you don’t know all of that when you’re reading, you can feel a depth in the color.”

“There’s the stadium in which these dialogues are played out in public, and then there’s people’s private lives. And this story takes place in private lives, not in a public stadium.”

Each partner insists it was the work of the other that made this book successful. “What I love about Gene’s work,” says Pham, “is that it’s always multilayered. It’s not a single story.” Like the lion dancers in their graphic novel, they know it takes two partners to make something beautiful and true.

The authors meshed together real details from each of their own lives to write Lunar New Year Love Story.

Nonfiction True Crime Memoir

Journalist Mandy Matney discusses reporting on Alex Murdaugh, a man who destroys everyone in his wake

When Mandy Matney graduated from journalism school at the University of Kansas in 2012 and her parents asked her to choose a celebratory vacation spot, she picked Hilton Head, South Carolina. During that trip, Matney remembers glancing at the local newspaper and thinking how nice it would be to have a job there. “They’re talking about alligators and all these cool things,” she remembers thinking.

“And then it happened!” Matney says, speaking from her Hilton Head home. After disappointing reporting stints in Missouri and Illinois, the Kansas native came to Hilton Head in 2016 as a reporter for The Island Packet. “I think I was drawn to this area for some reason,” she reminisces, adding, “I feel like it was kind of the universe telling me to come here.”

Several years later, Matney was covering a story much more predatory than alligators—the trial and conviction of prominent attorney Alex Murdaugh for the 2021 killings of his wife, Maggie, and their 22-year-old son, Paul. She had already been delving into the Murdaugh family’s influence and corruption: In 2019, 19-year-old Mallory Beach was killed in a boating accident in which Paul was driving, inebriated. These crimes opened a floodgate of investigations into Alex Murdaugh’s massive financial improprieties, and eventually led Matney to launch “Murdaugh Murders Podcast”—a career trajectory she recounts in Blood on Their Hands: Murder, Corruption, and the Fall of the Murdaugh Dynasty.

“You have to be the person to say something when you see that something isn’t right.”

Matney likens the Murdaugh case to a “superstorm that we can’t get out of,” acknowledging, “I kind of do miss my life before it was just constant chaos and absurdity.” After a bit of a break this summer, the Murdaugh story has heated up again, with Murdaugh asking for a new trial and his lawyers wrangling over whether the state or federal government should control the remainder of his assets. Throughout the myriad developments in the case, Matney has found the national press coverage to be “eye opening.” While she’s seen “a lot of really great journalism,” she acknowledges that she’s also been disappointed with reporters who “take the easiest, goriest, most salacious angle of the story and roll with it,” which is “the opposite of what I want to do.”

Cognizant of the swirling sea of media being produced about the family—books, documentaries and more—Matney and co-author Carolyn Murnick decided to frame their offering as her own “memoir based on four years of reporting,” a sort of story-behind-the-story that provides new material for even Matney’s most faithful podcast fans. It’s meant to be inspiring to other journalists, and, as Matney notes, “It’s the book that I would have wanted to have 10 years ago when I started my journalism career.”

“It’s kind of a whole new layer of vulnerability for me to tell all these [personal] stories,” she says, comparing her process to “taking an ice cream scoop to my insides” and revealing “those deep-down things that you don’t want to talk about and you don’t want to deal with.”

Matney grew up watching “Dateline” and “20/20″ with her mother, and remembers following the O.J. Simpson case when she was a kindergartner “because my mom was so into it.” She writes that although her first two jobs were soul-sucking (“I cried often”), her saving grace came in the form of nights spent listening to WBEZ’s “Serial” and watching Netflix’s “Making a Murderer,” while dreaming of “doing something as inspiring.”

Unfortunately, Matney’s job at The Island Packet was overshadowed by a misogynistic editor she refers to by the pseudonym “Charles Gardiner” in her memoir. When, for example, Matney got access to key files related to the strange 2015 hit-and-run death of a young man named Stephen Smith, potentially linked to the Murdaughs, Gardiner luridly asked, “What did you do to get that file?” Matney reflects, “I don’t think people talk enough about bosses being mentally abusive, and how much that affects your entire life and your work.”

Thankfully, she partnered with a savvy, supportive colleague, Liz Farrell (with whom she still collaborates) to follow their instincts in the Murdaugh story, even as their editor tried to discourage them. Matney believes that their outsiders’ perspectives added fuel to their reporting—they weren’t used to “this system of good old boys just running amok and doing whatever they wanted.” She adds, “I think a lot of people have a really hard time imagining that a guy who looks like Alex can do these things. But that’s a big point that I think we all need to realize is that there are people like Alex, who are manipulators and narcissists, and we can’t be fooled by them. . . .You have to be the person to say something when you see that something isn’t right, because they will—like Alex did—destroy everyone in their wake.” Just a few days before our conversation, Matney reveals, she stood a few feet away from Murdaugh during a federal hearing. “It’s bone-chilling,” she says. “It’s not fun for me to be in his presence.”

“It’s the book that I would have wanted to have 10 years ago when I started my journalism career.”

Matney’s memoir also addresses the toll that the case has taken on her mental health. “No one really told me when you start digging into stories that are this dark, and communicating often with victims of really horrific crimes, you are carrying a load that is unbearable at times. People need to talk about that.”

On a brighter note, Blood on Their Hands also chronicles how she and David Moses (then her boyfriend, now her husband) began their Murdaugh podcast. “It’s not this easy process where a microphone comes out of nowhere and just magically puts your words into a podcast and it sounds beautiful. It’s very frustrating at the beginning. . . . I’m not ashamed of the fact that our first few episodes sounded very rough. I want other people to know that it’s OK to start something and not be perfect at it. . . . I think that that’s been a big reason why a lot of our fans have been really attached to our podcast.” Matney loves podcasting, especially because “journalism is so different when you own your own business and you can actually do and say the things that you want.” Five years ago, she says, “I could never have dreamed of doing this with my husband in my house studio.”

Blood on Their Hands will surely satisfy true crime fans. And with Matney’s acknowledgment of the grinding work and mental toll her investigation demanded—to wit, “interviews with over one hundred sources, as well as hundreds of pages of legal filings, police reports, social media posts, and court transcripts”—the book is also a powerful tribute to journalism’s ability to hold the powerful to account.

Blood on Their Hands gets down and dirty with the murder and mayhem of the Murdaughs, the South Carolina family whose crimes made national news, and the toll it takes to bring the truth to light.

Children's & YA Picture Book Children's

Charly Palmer and Karida L. Brown celebrate the children of the sun

Very early in their relationship, in March 2017, artist Charly Palmer emailed Karida L. Brown a question: If you were to write a children’s book, what would it be? Brown, who has a doctorate in sociology and is a professor at Emory University, had always adored the Berenstain Bears books. “I thought I was a bear,” she recalls, speaking from their home in Atlanta, Georgia. However, she had another, very different answer for Palmer, explaining that she would love to create a book inspired by W.E.B. Du Bois’s writing for children.

Since graduate school, Brown has called Du Bois her “North Star and guiding light.” In 1920, the NAACP founder began publishing The Brownies’ Book: A Monthly Magazine for Children of the Sun, which circulated for nearly two years. Aimed at Black and brown children ages 6-16, the magazine’s inside cover announced, “DESIGNED FOR ALL CHILDREN BUT ESPECIALLY FOR OURS.” Brown recalls, “When I first learned about The Brownies’ Book, it shocked me. It really brought me to tears to think that one of the greatest intellectuals of the 20th century, who was so very busy, would take the time out to make this happen.”

Read our starred review of The New Brownies’ Book: A Love Letter to Black Families.

Now, the couple has turned their email musings into a stunning compendium of art and prose also aimed at young readers. The New Brownies’ Book: A Love Letter to Black Families is a thought-provoking collection filled with 60 stories, poems, essays, songs, photos, comics, plays, illustrations and photographs. They come from a wide variety of Black creators ranging from award-winning illustrators like James Ransome and poet Ntozake Shange to a number of young people—even Zoe Jones, a 5-year-old. In the book’s introduction, Palmer describes them as “an A-team of creative people that shared the same passion and commitment to Black Love.”

After sending out a request for contributions at the beginning of the pandemic, Brown notes, “We got loads of surprises with the submissions—and the range of literary and artistic expression.” For instance, she expected some sort of historical essay from Marcus Anthony Hunter, Ph.D., a UCLA professor. Instead, he sent an astonishing poem, “The Children of the Sun,” which helps introduce the collection. “We really thought that people would stay in their lane and stick to their genres,” Brown says, approving of the fact they did not.

Zoe Jones, the 5-year-old daughter of a friend, wrote a poem called “Kisses Make Things Better (But Sometimes They Don’t).” Two years later, when she saw the poem in the book, she said, “This person has the same name as me”—and she was ecstatic when her mother reminded her that it was indeed, her poem. Wesley Gordon, the 14-year-old son of one of Brown’s colleagues, wrote a powerful essay about the death of his grandfather, “Death Leaves a Scar; Love Leaves Memories.” Brown was impressed and sent him revision suggestions. “We were really intentional that this book should give new writers and artists the opportunity to have their first published work debut alongside some of these creative giants,” Brown explains. “It’s an elevator, in a way. It brings us all up.” In fact, the same was true for the original Brownies’ Book, which featured the first published poems of Langston Hughes (some of which also appear in this new volume).

The wide range of offerings is designed to appeal to many different ages. For instance, “I Don’t Wanna Be Black,” a short story by Shannon Byrd with graphic art from KEEF CROSS, features a young girl encountering difficult racial stories on TV that she doesn’t “quite understand,” but which make her feel “powerless and scared” as well as fearful about her skin color. Her parents’ reassurances—portrayed in dynamic, colorful art—on how proud she should feel about her identity offer an affirming way to address the issue for young readers. Elsewhere, an essay from a Fisk University student discusses the value of her college experiences, while a successful CPA notes the importance of not sacrificing happiness for financial stability.

Some of these stories, you just gotta let it soak. The point is not that the child will comprehend every single nugget. But if the book is on your coffee table, it gets up in your bones, it gets in your spirit. And as you mature, it allows you to explore and tap into the range of human emotions and the human condition through stories and art.

Palmer and Brown emphasize that they wanted this book to be “intergenerational” and encourage conversations among children, parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles. In The New Brownies’ Book, Palmer includes a portrait of Brown’s Aunt Mary, who often said, when cooking, “You gotta let it soak. When you soak your meat, it’s gonna taste better. Same thing with your mind.” Brown notes, “Some of these stories, you just gotta let it soak. The point is not that the child will comprehend every single nugget. But if the book is on your coffee table, it gets up in your bones, it gets in your spirit. And as you mature, it allows you to explore and tap into the range of human emotions and the human condition through stories and art.”

During his childhood as one of five siblings raised by a single mother, Palmer often found inspiration in biographies of accomplished Black people. “We have a little bit of that woven throughout the book,” he says. One section, “She’roes,” contains the portraits and short biographies of 21 Black women, from Biddy Mason to Aretha Franklin. Palmer adds that he wants readers to know “you all have the potential to be great.” He says, “As much as my subject matter today is of the Black experience, I came to art through the Beatles. I was intrigued by their style of dress and the fact that they looked like they had so much fun. They have really great songs that I still listen to . . . I wanted to try to put on paper what the Beatles made me feel like.” Later on, the writings of James Baldwin made him feel the same way.

If you really look at this book, it isn’t about being Black. It’s about being human, about family love, laws and humor—the threads that connect us all.

This husband-and-wife team would love for their book to be on the coffee table of every Black family in America and around the world, and they have partnered with the nonprofit Page Turners to help distribute The New Brownies’ Book to underserved schools. Palmer notes, “If you really look at this book, it isn’t about being Black. It’s about being human, about family love, laws and humor—the threads that connect us all.”

When asked if they wish Du Bois could see their new book, Brown says, “I feel like his spirit as our ancestor is all over this thing.” She mentions a letter she once read that discussed his desire to restart the Brownies periodical: “It stayed on his mind. So, I know that Du Bois would be so very proud to know that The Brownies’ Book lives on.”

The spirit of W.E.B. Du Bois lives on in a new anthology by Charly Palmer and Karida L. Brown.

Children's & YA Middle Grade Children's

A gutsy girl in Portland

When Renée Watson read her first Ramona Quimby book as a child, she was startled by where Beverly Cleary’s beloved heroine lived: Klickitat Street was just around the corner from Watson’s aunt’s home in Portland, Oregon. “I was so in awe that a character in a book could live in my city and in a neighborhood that I was very familiar with,” Watson remembers. “It was empowering. I didn’t know how to articulate that as a child except to say, ‘I know where she lives.’” From that moment on, whenever Watson visited her aunt, it became a running joke to say, “Ramona is your neighbor.”

Now, as an adult writing for young people, Watson divides her time between Portland and New York. Ways to Build Dreams is the fourth and likely final installment in her middle grade series about Ryan Hart, a lively, inquisitive Black girl who lives in Portland, just like Ramona Quimby. “I see the power in representation,” Watson says, speaking from her Harlem home. “We say that a lot when it comes to race, but I also think where people live and the names of places and the histories of places matter too.”

“The Ryan Hart series is in many ways a love letter to Portland,” Watson continues. “Portland is the perfect balance of city and nature, and I really wanted to highlight that. I’ve done a lot of work critiquing Portland and talking about some of its challenging, harmful issues, but there’s also so much to love.” For instance, in Ways to Build Dreams, Ryan and her family take a day trip driving along the Columbia River, with stops at Latourell Falls and Vista House at Crown Point. Ryan also attends Vernon Elementary, the school Watson attended in real life. “I was trying to model the series after [Beverly Cleary] in that same way of actually naming real places in the city so that young people in Portland could have an anchor and really see their city represented.” (She also features her hometown in several books for older readers, such as Piecing Me Together, which received a Newbery Honor and a Coretta Scott King Award).

“Portland is the perfect balance of city and nature, and I really wanted to highlight that. I’ve done a lot of work critiquing Portland and talking about some of its challenging, harmful issues, but there’s also so much to love.”

Watson remembers that she loved reading about Ramona because “she is not perfect and has flaws and can throw tantrums and feel all of her emotions. At the time, that just felt so freeing because there weren’t a lot of girl characters who could be as bold, feisty and human.” She loosely based Ryan’s personality on that of her goddaughter, who is now 15—and also named Ryan Hart. “In every book I write, the main character’s name is intentional,” Watson notes. “I was just thinking of Ryan as being a more traditional male name and was going to build off of it. But then, as I looked into what her name means, I was like, ‘Oh my goodness, it is just so perfect.’” Ryan means “little king” in Gaelic, and that connotation has become an anchor for every book. “I wanted to make sure that I’m constantly bringing the reader back to this notion of living up to your name or to what your loved ones wish for you,” Watson explains.

While the character named Ryan is an active kid who rides her bike and gets in water balloon fights, Watson notes: “I was not that girl. If we were going to the park, I would be the one who would bring my book with me or my journal, and I would sit under the tree and write poems or read while my friends were playing. I was a quiet and very creative child—very introspective.” Still, Ryan’s family dynamics and adventures, while fictional, are inspired by Watson’s own childhood.

During middle school, Watson was bused to a white school on the other side of town, an experience she described in a moving 1995 essay, “Black Like Me.” One day, her seventh grade science teacher chastised the class for failing a test on which Watson got an A, saying, “And this is why I am so disappointed in all of you. You let Renée Watson come all the way over here from northeast Portland and get a better grade than you in science!” When Watson later pondered that painful moment, she wondered, “What if she had allowed space in her narrative for black children from northeast Portland to be capable of meeting high expectations, of achieving academic success? What if she really saw me?”

Watson answers that question in many ways with the Ryan Hart books, filling them with moments of Black joy and achievement. Ways to Build Dreams begins with Ryan and her classmates working on a group history project about Beatrice Morrow Cannady, a community activist and educator, and the owner of Oregon’s largest Black newspaper—a story Watson had been wanting to explore for some time.

While Watson enjoyed reading about Ramona Quimby, she saw more of a reflection of herself in the poetry of Maya Angelou, Langston Hughes, Nikki Giovanni and Gwendolyn Brooks: “Those poets raised me.” She adds that Sandra Cisneros’ novel The House on Mango Street (which is about a Latina girl growing up in Chicago) gave her “permission to write about home in the way that home was for me—a Black neighborhood, Black music, the food, all of that.” She adds, “I’m constantly trying to show young people in my books, ‘Hey, I see you and I know what you are capable of.’”

Watson’s goal is to provide “a nuanced telling of the Black community.” With Ryan Hart, she “leans into the joy more so than the pain.”

“So I do have these cultural moments, but they’re very much tied into these slices of the everydayness of being a Black girl in a city like Portland. . . . Because really, that was my childhood. Yes, there were hardships, but mostly there were family dinners and cookouts and neighbors looking out for me and teachers who loved me. We didn’t have a whole lot of money, but we had a whole lot of love.”

Some of Watson’s favorite scenes occur when Ryan’s grandmother washes and fixes her hair. “In Black culture, it really is a big deal because there’s so much conversation around our hair,” she says. “I wanted to highlight different hairstyles throughout the series, and normalize her getting her hair done and the way in which we do it. Those times I remember as a child were so sacred because you’re spending a lot of time with that person. You have conversations that you might not have [when facing each other]. [These scenes] became such an anchor in each book, where that’s really a breakthrough moment for Ryan. Usually, she’s telling Grandma about something that’s happening that’s not so great, and Grandma gives her some wisdom.”

Watson has always known that the series would end with Ryan graduating from fifth grade, which she does in Ways to Build Dreams. Still, she can’t help being a little sad to have finished the final installment.

Might we see Ryan again, perhaps in books focused on her siblings, Ray or Rose?

“Oh, I’ve never thought about that,” Watson says. “That’s a very good thing to think about.”

Read our starred review of Ways to Build Dreams.

Renée Watson celebrates her hometown and leans into Black joy and achievement through her feisty heroine, Ryan Hart.

Science Fiction & Fantasy Featured Horror

Tananarive Due’s ‘The Reformatory’ honors her family ghosts

Born of a real-world nightmare, Tananarive Due’s The Reformatory is a beautiful and bracing novel that melds historical fiction with speculative elements. Like many masterpieces, it is grounded in a fearsome experience. In late 2012, still reeling from the death of her mother, Due received an unexpected call from the Florida attorney general’s office. They told the acclaimed horror author, screenwriter and scholar that her mother’s uncle, Robert Stephens, had likely been buried on the grounds of the state’s now infamous Dozier School for Boys, a reform school that became a site of grotesque abuse. Researchers and state officials were looking for family members to approve exhumation at the site in order to document what happened.

As Due vividly remembers, “All this came as a shock.” Here was a close relative that she hadn’t even known about, and her family had already seen its share of violent trauma. In fact, she reflects, “When I first got the call, I thought it was in reference to another [boy] on my grandmother’s side who was actually put to death as a juvenile. And that was a family story we had heard about, but I had no idea about Robert Stephens.”

Getting to the root of what happened to Stephens would require excavating a painful history and risking reviving intergenerational trauma, but it was also a way to honor her mother. Due knew she had to see it through. Within months of that call, Due traveled to the town of Marianna in the Florida Panhandle to witness the moment when her great-uncle’s remains were brought to light.

“It was really almost as if history was trapped at that site.”

Upon arrival, one of the sheriffs on site pointed her down the road and told her to “follow the mudhole. I was like, what mudhole?” For Due, who was born in Tallahassee and was raised in Miami, with its distinctly urban and Latin American flavor, “this small Panhandle town was a whole new world.”

“The whole experience was so immersive,” Due says. “It was really almost as if history was trapped at that site.” While in Marianna, Due attended a meeting of Dozier survivors. A man recounted “a beating so severe that the poor child couldn’t see his parents on visiting day because his clothes had actually been whipped into the skin of his back.”

What Due witnessed in the swampy Florida heat transformed a strange obligation into a visceral and deeply felt mission, and cemented her desire to write about the boys at Dozier. She “couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be a child at this hell house.”

Book jacket image for The Reformatory by Tananarive Due

Finding the right genre and narrative for a subject this brutal, though, was a challenge. Though the former journalist had written a memoir with her mother, Civil Rights advocate Patricia Stephens Due (Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights), excellent memoirs had already been published by survivors, and Due felt too removed from the events to take a nonfiction angle on the subject. Ultimately, what Due really wanted to do was give Robert a better story than he had experienced in his short life. To do that, she needed to write a novel.

Due cares deeply about the social history she’s bringing to life, and sought to make dark realities accessible to readers. But she is also cognizant of the dangers of that quest and was loath to create anything that could be exploitative. This, Due is clear, is one of the greatest hurdles with this kind of material: “When we’re writing about difficult times in history, the line between trauma porn and honoring the past can be very thin.” That said, ignoring the violence that took place in real life was not an option. “I felt I had no choice but to have my protagonist experience at least a taste of what those survivors had talked about.”

Getting it all right felt urgent to Due, but also posed a perilously high degree of difficulty, the literary equivalent of performing a triple axle. In a testament to her skill, The Reformatory deftly delivers on all of its author’s aims.

Though it springs from the same grim institutional history as Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Nickel Boys, Due’s supernatural period thriller is riveting and highly original. Set in the 1950s, the novel centers a fictionalized version of Robert Stephens, a 12-year-old African American boy living in Florida whose life is changed when he tries to rescue his sister, Gloria, from being harassed by a wealthy white teenager. Thanks to the attacker’s powerful father, Robert is quickly arrested, convicted and sentenced to six months at the Dozier-esque Gracetown School for Boys. His stint at the cruel institution, euphemistically known as “the Reformatory,” comes 30 years after a fire that killed 25 boys, many of whom were buried on the grounds along with the bodies of other inmates. The ghosts of these dead boys haunt the school and Robert becomes their emissary, communicating with them and acting as an intermediary between the corrupt warden and the spirits seeking both revenge and release.

Before ‘The Reformatory,’ the longest Due had spent on a single work was two years. This one took seven.

This spectral element unlocked something crucial for Due: “The ghosts can represent the violence without me having to basically write a book that is just about beating after beating after beating, murder after murder after murder.” That blending of genres, history and the fantastical, struck an important balance, enabling her to tell hard truths without inflicting maximum trauma on herself or her readers.

Weaving history and the speculative is one of Due’s talents as a writer, but that particular mixture also has an established literary tradition as seen in works by other Black authors, such as Beloved by Toni Morrison. The rich history of how the African American experience has found expression in horror is a story Due has long worked to tell, both as executive producer on Horror Noire, a documentary on the history of Black horror, and through her groundbreaking college courses on the Black horror aesthetic. While the creative path that emerged felt like a fit to the veteran horror writer, it was still rocky. Threading the needle between truth and exploitation required skill and more time than she had ever devoted to a project. Before The Reformatory, the longest Due had spent on a single work was two years. This one took seven.

For part of that time, Due was immersed in and, she admits, “hiding behind” the research process. In 2018, she published a short story also titled “The Reformatory” in the Boston Review that tackled the most difficult scene from her work in progress. Then came COVID-19 and a jolting sense of her own mortality.

Read our starred review of ‘The Reformatory’ by Tananarive Due.

“It was COVID that really kicked me in the pants and made me realize on a deep visceral level that I could die without finishing the book,” Due says. The memory of that time is still vivid. “This was before the vaccine. This was when we didn’t know what was going on. So it was during that time that I put myself on a very strict page quota and I kept a chart up on my wall.” The placement was meaningful. “There was a day I didn’t write, and all those zeros were right in my face. That was the kind of discipline it took to finally finish the book. It was a real push.”

That life-altering visit to Marianna was a perfect matching of subject, artist and moment: The result is a genre-crossing masterwork. Ten years after it was begun, The Reformatory has come to fruition.

Photo of Tananarive Due by Melissa Herbert.

In her masterful horror novel, Due fictionalizes her great uncle’s experiences at the notorious Dozier School for Boys—the same institution that inspired Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys.

Fiction Literary Fiction Historical Fiction Family Saga

Connection across borders and generations

The Liberators explores themes of intergenerational trauma, reconciliation and forgiveness, both at an individual level and at a national one. These are topics you also delved into in your memoir, The Magical Language of Others. How do you view the two books in relation to one another?

Thank you for bringing to light the connection between The Liberators and The Magical Language of Others. There is a spider’s web hanging between the books that one can pass through without ever breaking the line. Just as the memoir makes the novel possible, the novel seems to offer new perspectives to the memoir—to deepen the conversation of human history, a lineage of atrocity and reparation. In The Liberators, Robert says, “Sometimes your past smiles at you. Other times your past points a gun at you.”

You recently worked as a writer on the television adaptation of Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko. For most authors, writing is a fairly solitary experience, so what was it like for you to be in a writers’ room where you were part of a team? Was there anything you learned during that process that you brought to writing The Liberators?

The notion of table setting, from my doctoral work, became a part of the writers room. Table setting is a way to hold many opposing ideas at once: You can set the table with your ideas but you cannot take off another person’s setting. So one may sit across from another with whom they disagree, with a willingness to watch what the settings would do on their own. This willingness is rooted in not what one has set on the table but what could be discovered. Extending the table, we extend ourselves—and together we can reckon with even the things we cannot change. This way of holding opposing ideas became a part of The Liberators.

“Through different perspectives across culture, geography and generations, I hope to continue investigating our collected memory as a braid of our humanity.”

You have translated other poets’ poems from Korean into English, but so far, your own works have only been published in English. How does your translation work inform your writing process?

The Liberators will be my first work to be translated from English to Korean, and I won’t be translating it myself. Alongside readers, I will experience the sentences take on another shape and sound. Translation bridges histories between languages, nations and cultures. Translators like Don Mee Choi, Anton Hur and Sora Kim-Russell use translation to create pathways toward unsettled truths about imperialism and colonialism and militarism. In a way, my work as a writer wouldn’t be possible without me first understanding my work as a translator.

One interesting feature of The Liberators is that it is told through myriad perspectives over the course of nearly 40 years. What made you choose a multi-narrator approach?

Elizabeth Rosner writes in Survivor Café: The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory, “We are all responsible to continue unraveling and at the same time underscoring this tenacious human lineage of destruction and restoration.” Nona Fern&aacutendez’s novel The Twilight Zone is another book that collects the memories of perpetrators and victims, of prisoners and liberators. Through different perspectives across culture, geography and generations, I hope to continue investigating our collected memory as a braid of our humanity.

Food plays an important part in The Liberators. One dish in particular, mulnaengmyeon (cold noodles in chilled broth) is at the center of an especially moving passage. Are there any other food moments in the novel that stand out for you?

After reading my novel, my advisor Shawn Wong at the University of Washington, gave me such a compliment by asking where he could have mulnaengmyeon. Food crosses boundaries and borders—real and imaginary. A moment I love is when Insuk, upon meeting her daughter-in-law, feeds her constantly. Insuk changes in such a way that her heart takes on the shape of a spoon.

“I asked how . . . we recognize the dead, and how the dead recognize us. This is the place from which the book began to take shape.”

In addition to the personal storylines, historical events act as catalysts and propel the narrative. What kind of research did you do when it came to plotting the book and how did you approach balancing the historical with the fictional?

The first lines of the novel came out of my doctoral research in trauma across Korean American literature, history and film. At the same time, I was completing my memoir and the script for “Pachinko.” In the translator’s note to South Korean poet Kim Hyesoon’s collection, Autobiography of Death, translator Don Mee Choi defines autobiography as “an autotestimony and autoceremony that reenacts trauma and narrates our historical death—how we have died and how we remain living within the structure of death.” I asked how, beyond research and writing, we recognize the dead, and how the dead recognize us. This is the place from which the book began to take shape.

You recently completed your PhD in English Literature with a focus on Korean American literature, history and film. Can you recommend some books by Korean and Korean American authors that our readers may not be familiar with but should consider checking out?

Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, The Future of Silence: Fiction by Korean Women translated by Ju-Chan Fulton and Bruce Fulton, Grass by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim translated by Janet Hong, Memories of My Ghost Brother by Heinz Insu Fenkl, DMZ Colony by Don Mee Choi, How I Became a North Korean by Krys Lee, Autobiography of Death by Kim Hyesoon translated by Don Mee Choi, Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung translated by Anton Hur, I Hear Your Voice by Young-ha Kim translated by Krys Lee, and many works without whom neither this novel nor I myself could have existed.

Readers might be surprised to discover that in the last year you have set yourself a goal of writing 1000 love letters to strangers. Tell us how this project came about and what it means to you.

In 2016, I was heartbroken over my work and decided to give up writing. But I put out a call online: I would write 1000 love letters to strangers. The next day I found [I had received] requests from all over the world. For me, what I longed for through words was human connection. By some magic, I was able to complete a poetry book and memoir, and now I’m so grateful to share this novel.

With a PhD completed, a new novel out and 400 love letters to go, what will you do next?

It feels impossible to show the full extent of my gratitude to those who have helped me along the way—my teachers and colleagues: Susan E. Davis, Greg McClure, Greg November, Don Mee Choi, Shawn Wong, Paul Lisicky, Krys Lee, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, Matthew Salesses, Tayari Jones, Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello, Crystal Hana Kim, Emily Jungmin Yoon, David Krolikoski, Joseph Han, Ed Park, Jimin Han, Jang Wook Huh, Esther Ra, Elizabeth Rosner, Brian Reed, Timothy Donnelly, Eamon Grennan, Mark Strand and so many more. A part of that gratitude I hope to show by helping others who may feel the weight of loss and may need the reminder that, no matter what, you must not give up hope, because the sun shines on every wreckage and every place on earth, on everyone and on you.

Read our starred review of The Liberators.

E.J. Koh wields language in many ways: She has written memoir, poetry and TV scripts, as well as translating others’ poetry. Now, in her debut novel, The Liberators, Koh digs into the tensions between language, memory and history as she follows one family from the military dictatorship of 1980s South Korea to the conflicts of their Korean American community in 2000s California.

Nonfiction Science

Glimpse visions of fungal life in this gift book for mushroom fans

Your first book, Entangled Life, became such a success upon its publication in the spring of 2020. It was both a product of and a contributor to a new global phenomenon: our fascination with fungi. You’ve said that the book’s reception came as a surprise, but here you are now, transforming it into an illustrated gift edition, filled with stunning macrophotography of lichen and mushrooms, and microphotography of spores and nematodes. What does it mean to you, to present your book in this new format?

So much of fungal life takes place out of the reach of our unaided senses that it can be hard to find a way into their worlds; we need all the help we can get and sometimes words can only get us so far. To come closer to fungi we have to look at them. Indeed, much of our modern scientific understanding of fungi—and life in general—has been transformed by microscopes that enhance our ability to see, rendering the invisible visible. My own understanding of fungi, like those of many of my colleagues, has similarly been transformed by the many hours I’ve spent looking at fungi, often gazing down a microscope. The illustrated edition of Entangled Life is a way to invite readers into some of these astonishing visual worlds and celebrate the remarkable artist-researchers who have painstakingly captured these images. I think it is a beautiful book to hold and explore.

How did you go about abridging the text? Did the imagery guide you in any way, or was it the other way around?

It was a challenge! When writing, I often found myself imagining the book’s themes and stories as cords that I could splice, braid and weave. I soon realized that abridging the text meant more than just cutting words and sections; I had to make sure that I had suitably re-woven the threads. Sometimes I was guided by the imagery, and sometimes I had to let the text tell me how it wanted to flow. I had anticipated that this would be a frustrating process, but in fact it turned out to be satisfying, and I’m happy with the outcome.

Speaking of this new widespread appreciation for fungi, what do you think it’s all about? We can certainly look back to Michael Pollan’s 2018 book, How to Change Your Mind, and the 2019 film Fantastic Fungi, and we can make assumptions about how 2020’s COVID-19 pandemic led people toward yeasty hobbies like brewing and baking, and toward greater desire for mycelium-like closeness. Or perhaps it’s been driven by a desperate hope that fungus will save the world by eating all our plastics and all our problems. What do you believe has most captured our attention about fungi, and why now?

I think there are a few reasons. The first is quite simple: We know more about fungi than we used to thanks to the development of technologies—like DNA sequencing—and decades of brilliant work by mycologists all over the world. The more we have learned, the more we have been able to appreciate the vital roles that fungi play in Earth’s systems.

“These are remarkable depictions of symbiosis in action: You can see the fungi clasping the algal cells. It’s so intimate.”

Second, as environmental emergencies have worsened, a growing awareness of the interconnectivity of all life forms has permeated public consciousness. This has coincided with the rise of network science and network models, now used to make sense of everything from human social lives to biochemistry. Fungi are interconnected organisms—most live their lives as networks and form literal connections between organisms—and so make powerful poster organisms for both ecological and network thinking.

Third, I think the growing interest in psychedelics has also played a part. Much of the recent wave of research into psychedelics has taken place with psilocybin, found in “magic” mushrooms, and I think the astonishing and puzzling effects of this compound have helped awaken curiosity to fungi more generally.

Fourth, as you suggest, people have been captivated by the many ways we might partner with fungi to help us to adapt to life on a damaged planet. Ongoing environmental devastation has brought about renewed interest in the fungal world, and radical mycological possibilities abound, from fungal medicines to fungal foods, to new building materials and more.

So much of your discussion of fungi is about relationships and challenging the definition of the individual–which is another reason we might assume your book has reached so many readers. (Imagine if human social media could provide the level of connection of the mycorrhizal “wood wide web”!) Yet this illustrated edition features fungi portraiture, with close-ups of individual fruiting bodies in their best light. I wonder, when looking at these photographs, do you see an individual?

No, I don’t. Mushrooms are loosely analogous to a plant’s fruit. When I see an apple, I see a representative of an apple tree with tangling branches growing upwards, and tangling roots growing into the soil. Likewise, when I see a mushroom, I see a representative of a sprawling fungal network, itself potentially linked up to one or more plants. We are only ever looking at part of the picture.

Some of the book’s images feel more abstract to the untrained eye. If you know what you’re looking at, an image may inform and illuminate; to the layperson, the same imagery can confound. Which images have been most illuminating to you, and which have been most challenging?

One of the things I was trying to do in this book was to play with scale, moving from images of comparatively large subjects like mushrooms and humans to microscopic subjects like spores and mycelial networks. I’ve found an interesting effect arises when one shuttles between scales: The familiar can become unfamiliar, as if we’re looking at something for the first time. A familiar looking mushroom might suddenly look strange, and a microscope image of a mycelial network might feel like a vast landscape or a dense forest in which one could get lost. In this way I’ve found that many of the images that are most bewildering are also the most beautiful.

As we learn in the section on lichens, the creation of the word symbiosis completely transformed the field of ecology as well as our overall understanding of the way the world works. It was a shift away from the hypercompetitive notion of “red in tooth and claw” evolution, instead acknowledging the complexities of relationships in the natural world. Have any of the images in this book dramatically shaken up your field the way this word did?

So many of these images represent key concepts and perspectives, but some of my favorites are the images of lichens captured and created by Toby Spribille and Arseniy Belosokhov. These are remarkable depictions of symbiosis in action: You can see the fungi clasping the algal cells. It’s so intimate. I’ve never seen such good images of lichens.

In the opposite case to symbiosis, sometimes words fall short, like when using the word brain to describe the signals sent through a mycelial network. There are also pitfalls in relying too heavily on metaphors, as symbols don’t always translate from one person to the next. And sometimes, the answer to a question is still just “we don’t know,” such as the question of what psilocybin teaches us about the human mind. How do you reconcile the unknown with your scientific pursuit to know?

Much of the practice of the sciences involves choosing how to relate to the unknown. Fungi make questions of our categories, and thinking about them makes the world look different. It was my growing delight in their power to do so that led me to write this book in the first place. I have tried to find ways to enjoy the ambiguities and mysteries that fungi present, but it’s not always easy to be comfortable in the space created by open questions. Then again, when you answer a question, it ceases to be a question. I’ve learned to enjoy the exhilaration of unanswered questions and the way that they pull one forward into deeper inquiry.

“There are so many ways to be a fungus, just as there are so many ways to be an animal. . . . A great white shark might be scary. But the fact that the shark is scary wouldn’t necessarily make you scared of all other animals.”

Two of your own images are included in the book. What brings you the most joy or pride about them?

I love the way that they depict the remarkable intimacy of the physical relationship between plant and fungus. Of course, the images have additional layers of meaning for me: They are representations not only of the fungi living in the roots of a plant, but of the rest of the plant and its web of relationships within a tropical forest in which I spent a lot of time.

Although this illustrated edition has so many incredible images, it’s impossible to rely wholly on vision when it comes to fungi. Our eyes and cameras can only perceive so much. I wonder if this required imagination is why, even in a mushroom-loving cultural moment, some people still fear fungus and its unknowns. What would you say to those whose imagination turns to fear?

Fear of fungi runs deep in some cultures, whether because of poisonous mushrooms, the threat of fungal pathogens or the fact that so many fungi are decomposers and therefore associated with death and decay. In reality, fungi are a kingdom of life, as broad and busy a category as animals or plants. There are so many ways to be a fungus, just as there are so many ways to be an animal. A particular fungal pathogen might be scary, just as a great white shark might be scary. But the fact that the shark is scary wouldn’t necessarily make you scared of all other animals. Faced with fear about fungi, I would turn my mind to their many essential life-giving properties and the many ways human existence is unimaginable without them. No plants could exist without fungi, for example, nor would bread, alcohol, soy sauce or any number of lifesaving fungal medicines.

What is your advice for all amateurs crouching over a patch of forest, hoping for their own encounter with a mushroom or lichen?

One of the most important things is to sit and let one’s eyes adjust. It often takes a while for fungi to jump out at you. Sitting quietly, with a softer focus, can be a helpful way to tune in.

The only way your readership hasn’t been able to experience your book’s content is by taste and smell, so I must ask, is a fermentation guide in your future?

Not currently, although my brother Cosmo and I have recently released a line of live, fermented hot sauce!

Read our review of Entangled Life: The Illustrated Edition.

Merlin Sheldrake has transformed his bestseller, Entangled Life, into a photography book with an abridged text. The psychedelic and disorienting imagery it contains stars mushrooms and lichens, spores and gills, a glorious unseen world now in Technicolor.

Fiction Literary Fiction

Sonora Jha’s ‘The Laughter’ is coming for the ivory tower

“It’s important for me to transgress. It’s important for me to be subversive,” says novelist, essayist and professor Sonora Jha (How to Raise a Feminist Son) during a video call to her home in Seattle, Washington. “For those of us on the margins, I think having our agency and transgressing like crazy will better everything.”

The Laughter is subversive in its approach, form and content. As an authentic and nuanced character study, it demands that readers grapple with issues of race, sexuality, power, tradition and academia. It carefully and systematically explores how conflicts over privilege and control are enacted on our minds and bodies.

The story centers on Oliver Harding, a middle-aged white male English professor at a liberal arts college in Seattle. Oliver is a decorated academic whose personal and professional identity is wrapped up in the focus of his research, the early 20th-century British writer G.K. Chesterton. Divorced from his wife, his relationship with his daughter strained, Oliver turns his focus on Ruhaba Khan, a Muslim law professor at the university. Ruhaba is dealing with the reality of being a woman of color on a predominately white campus while building a relationship with Adil Alam, her nephew who recently emigrated from France after getting into some trouble.

Read our starred review of The Laughter.

Both Oliver and Ruhaba find themselves caught up in social upheaval on campus, as a multicultural student movement demanding progressive transformations draws ire of aging white faculty. This mixture of personal and political turmoil makes for a contemplative yet thrilling and ultimately devastating read.

While certainly a work of fiction, The Laughter pulls from Jha’s journalistic background, her experiences as a faculty member at Seattle University and her life as an American immigrant. (She grew up in Mumbai, India.) The seeds of the book were planted in 2016, after Jha learned that French towns were beginning to ban burkinis, swimwear that covers both the head and body to align with Muslim values. The bans appeared after a terrorist attack in Nice and reflected forced Muslim assimilation into French secular culture. This attempt to regulate Muslim identity prompted her to consider the visceral impact of both anti-Muslim conditioning and cultural marginalization in general, both central themes in The Laughter. “I definitely wanted to build a story around them. And I kept visualizing this image of this boy watching his mother being asked to take off her hijab,” she says.

Book jacket image for The Laughter by Sonora Jha

Jha explains that Oliver is the type of man who obsessively fights for control, both in his personal life and in society at large. He’s seemingly at odds with himself, and due to his own personal failings, he lives a lonely life. Despite this, he exhibits an intense sense of entitlement and a need for authority over both Ruhaba and the on-campus protests.

Men like Oliver, says Jha, “are all around us. They’re in academia. They’re our friends. I have felt that sense of control [from them], especially the moments in which they feel like they are losing that control or handing it over to someone else. This happens even if they were encouraging you all along. I’ve had experiences where mentors of mine, when I finally came into my power, were like, ‘Wait, you’re supposed to be grateful. You’re supposed to take up just enough space as I give to you.’ . . . It’s almost like they will mentor you and give you just enough, but they want to still be in charge.”

“It was creepy that this voice already existed and is the literary voice in my imagination.”

A reader could wonder how Jha, a woman of Indian descent, was able to provide such a richly authentic first-person portrayal of a privileged middle-aged white man. She notes that she first attempted to write the novel in third person, but almost in an instinctive way, the first-person voice began to take over her writing. She believes that it emerged, forcefully, out of a lifetime of engaging with Western literature.

“This white male voice is so dominant in my imagination because this is who we read when I was growing up in India,” she says. “It was creepy that this voice already existed and is the literary voice in my imagination.” To further capture the voice, she immersed herself in the white male literary canon. “As the rest of the world was starting to read more women of color, I was reading the likes of John Updike and Saul Bellow,” she quips.

From Oliver’s perspective, we witness his insidious exoticization, shown most prominently through his sexual attraction to Ruhaba and his suspicions of Adil. Oliver fixes his sexual gaze on the parts of Ruhaba’s appearance that are nonwhite; he has both a figurative and literal fetish for her Indian-ness. At the same time, he responds to her nonphysical differences with confusion and disgust. Similarly, Oliver perceives Adil’s identity as a dangerous “otherness” that needs to be surveilled, tested and controlled.

Jha explains that this two-faced response is a common conflict that immigrants face in their interpersonal relationships. “You have to be exotic enough for me to fetishize you, but not so much that it’s a whole other thing that I have to deal with,” she says. “I will provide for you, and I will protect you from your own kind who are not good for you, but to be in my protection, you have to be a little bit more like me.”

“That’s the part of me that is maybe reflected in Ruhaba, that I exist on the fringes of every sense of community.”

Despite Oliver’s control over the narrative, Ruhaba emerges as a deeply complicated character full of internal conflicts. As a Muslim immigrant woman, she exhibits a seemingly naive hope about the possibilities of American life that’s at odds with the fetishizing, distrust and exclusion that is enacted upon her. She also wears a hijab despite her complicated feelings about her Muslim heritage.

Author Sonora Jha

“For immigrant women, I think there’s the excitement of coming to a place that promises all kinds of freedoms, but there’s also the pressure to conform to a certain sort of cultural performance, because we need community,” Jha says. “That’s the part of me that is maybe reflected in Ruhaba, that I exist on the fringes of every sense of community. We crave belonging and community, but we don’t want it to be prescribed for us. So Ruhaba’s relationship with the hijab is a way to control her own appearance and her own relationships with people, on campus or otherwise.”

Adil is also a beautifully crafted character who exhibits a level of complexity that we rarely see in depictions of young men of color. A teenage boy who is as sensitive as he is intelligent, Adil is willing to be open about his hopes and his fears. At the same time, his urge to protect is what upends his life on multiple occasions. In the spirit of How to Raise a Feminist Son, Jha uses Adil’s character to explore and challenge constructions of masculinity. “When can we tell our boys that you don’t have to connect with this toxic masculinity of protector and provider?” Jha asks. “I wanted Adil to have that tenderness, and even a refusal of that kind of masculinity.”

“When can we tell our boys that you don’t have to connect with this toxic masculinity of protector and provider?”

The college campus is very much a character in the novel as well. It is a force with its own nuances and actions, and competing groups of social actors seek to harness this energy to execute their own visions of the future. Political dialogue is often reduced to simply right versus left, but Jha’s depiction of campus life complicates this, showing how political conflicts are often rooted in issues of power and privilege. Innovative graduate students are attempting to transform the campus into a more inclusive and progressive space. Meanwhile, white middle-aged tenured professors, who once considered themselves progressive, are actively resisting this change. This results in a series of microaggressions and racist commentaries that undermine the college’s purported liberalism.

“I think what’s happening with white folks in academia is a sense of displacement, the worry that fun can be had without them, that there’s a lot of brilliance that is ‘not of my kind,’” Jha says. “BIPOC folks and other folks are redefining culture. So we keep hearing these white academics say, ‘We worked hard’ or ‘There are more restrictions for us’ or ‘We played by the rules,’ because any kind of displacement is going to cause discomfort, even in the life of the mind.”

“Decenter the white male narrative and the white imagination on our campuses, and it can only enrich things and make us more comfortable.”

Despite the rampant personal and political turmoil, The Laughter is not a nihilistic story, due to a throughline of hope from the student body. They channel a transformative energy. “I advise the newspaper on my campus, and the kids truly believe in something, and they truly care about change,” Jha says. The novel’s students display unapologetic ideological independence and an unflinching courage to stand up for themselves, which means sometimes standing against faculty and administration.

To BIPOC people working in academia and other white-dominated spaces, Jha offers a sharp final word of advice: “Find your own people and have your own agency, and let’s see what [we] do,” she says. “Decenter the white male narrative and the white imagination on our campuses, and it can only enrich things and make us more comfortable.”

Photos of Sonora Jha by Josiane Faubert.

The author of How to Raise a Feminist Son sharpens the campus obsession novel into a brilliant indictment of exoticization.

Children's & YA Picture Book Children's

Kim Taylor brings history to life with needle and thread

In A Flag for Juneteenth, Kim Taylor tells the story of Huldah, a Black girl who lives with her enslaved family on a plantation in Texas. It’s June 1865, and tomorrow is Huldah’s 10th birthday—but it’s also the day that Huldah will witness the historic reading of the proclamation that President Abraham Lincoln has freed all enslaved people. A self-taught textile artist, Taylor’s illustrations for the book are exquisitely detailed quilts that fill the story with a spirit of joy and freedom.

Tell us about Huldah and what’s happening in her life at the beginning of your book.
Huldah is a mature, curious, insightful little girl. She has the very grown-up responsibility of caring for her baby sister while her parents work on the plantation. We meet Huldah the day before her 10th birthday, which falls on a Sunday. Sundays during this time were a day for rest and reconnecting with family and community. Huldah’s mom baked Huldah’s favorite, tea cakes, for her upcoming birthday, a luxury she may not have had time for during the week.

What did you research to write this book?
I devoured everything I could read about Juneteenth, but that was only the beginning! I was curious about what life was like for enslaved people when they were not working and how they connected with their immediate and extended families. I was very interested in understanding how they built a sense of community despite such oppressive circumstances.

I Googled, listened to podcasts and read books about that time. I also looked at pictures of enslaved people, which helped me to imagine their personalities and lives. One picture of a little girl that I found on the Library of Congress website seemed to embody the spirit of my Huldah, and I kept her image in mind as I developed the character.

Many of the characters’ names in the story are symbolic. Will you tell us about some of these names and what they represent?
I wanted my main character’s name to be unusual, a name that would be new to my readers. I envisioned this character to be a prophet, one who could bear witness to the announcement of the end of slavery as a legal institution and could also foretell of a future free of bondage. I Googled biblical female prophets and an image of a beautiful Black woman appeared on my screen. Her name was Huldah. As soon as I saw her, I knew that this would be the name of my main character.

“I remember telling a friend that I felt as though Huldah had become like a daughter to me. I felt a deep connection to her character.”

Eve, the name of Huldah’s baby sister, is also biblical. It is derived from a Hebrew word meaning “to breathe” or “to live.” In my story, Eve is an infant. She will have the opportunity to live her life without the legal burden of enslavement.

One other character in my story has a name. Mr. Menard is the oldest man on the plantation. He has the last name of Michel B. Menard, the founder of Galveston, Texas, where my story takes place. I thought that it was important to demonstrate that enslaved people were often given the last names of their enslavers to erase any connection to their own family lineage.

You’ve said that each of your quilts feels as though it is created “through [you], rather than by [you]” and that you feel a “deep connection with [your] ancestors during the creative process.” What was the journey of writing this book and creating its quilted illustrations like for you?
I felt that I was being guided in some way while writing and creating the illustrations for this book. I saved the pictures that I discovered during my research and looked at them often when writing, trying to connect in some way.

I fell in love with Huldah very early on. Because the people in this book have no faces, I had to figure out how to give Huldah depth and to showcase her personality in other ways. I also needed to make her consistent and recognizable in every illustration. That is no easy task when working with fabric on such a small scale! I remember telling a friend that I felt as though Huldah had become like a daughter to me. I felt a deep connection to her character.

The illustrations took a little over a year to create. It was an enormous undertaking and very emotional. When I was finished with all of the illustrations, I was amazed that I had actually achieved it! I don’t think that I could have done it if I did not know on some level that my ancestors were watching over me and guiding me throughout this journey.

Tell us about your quilting journey and how you began to make story quilts.
When I was young, I loved to color, paint and lose myself in arts and crafts projects. I liked to make clothes for my dolls using my mother’s scarves. When I was about 8 or 9 years old, I discovered my mother’s Singer sewing machine, and I wanted to learn to use it. My mom didn’t sew but encouraged me to try it out. I taught myself how to work it and began trying to make clothes for my dolls. Throughout my childhood, I used art as a vehicle to relax or to create something that I needed, such as pillows or simple paintings for a new apartment.

“I love exploring different colors and texture combinations when I am just beginning a new quilt. There are so many different possibilities!”

It wasn’t until I discovered story quilting that I began to use art as a vehicle to process deep emotion. When Barack Obama was elected to be our 44th president, I had feelings that I found difficult to verbally express. I wanted to create something to mark the historic event but felt it important to use an art form that had some connection to my ancestors. I thought about my West African ancestors and how women there are master weavers and textile artists. I thought about enslaved African and African American women and how they used quilting not only to keep their families warm but also to tell stories about family memories and ancestral history. I decided to try my hand at this art form and fell in love immediately.

How has your artistic process changed or evolved since you began quilting?
At the beginning of my journey, I worried about making mistakes but quickly came to the realization that art quilting is very forgiving. Many things that I saw as mistakes enhanced my pieces and made them more visually interesting.

I decided early on that I would teach myself something new for each quilt. I researched techniques online and bought many books about art quilting to help me to learn the basics. I have become a better artist over the years because of this decision. I am more mindful now about fabric color and texture and how they work together to set the mood of a piece. It’s all been trial and error though. I did not go to art school, so it’s been a wondrous learning journey!

What is your favorite part of the process of creating a quilt?
I love exploring different colors and texture combinations when I am just beginning a new quilt. There are so many different possibilities! There is no need to commit to anything in that early planning stage because nothing is sewn down yet. I am free to move fabrics around and discover what feels right for that unique piece.

“I felt it was critical to highlight the beauty and resilience of African and African American people during their enslavement, as well as to showcase the importance of strong family and community ties.”

I would love to hear about how you composed these illustrations. How did you choose the fabrics? Do any of them have special significance?
When planning the illustrations, I tried to keep the text in mind and made decisions about what aspects needed to be enhanced. For example, the first page describes tea cakes, a traditional cookie that enslaved people made using simple pantry ingredients. I thought it was important to help readers visualize a tea cake, so I set out to create them using one of the brown fabrics from my stash that had some color variations. Tea cakes were not fancy, but they were delicious and smelled amazing, so I used hand-embroidered lettering to show the movement of the scent wafting through the air. Embroidery was the new thing I taught myself for this project.

I chose fabrics that I felt would have matched the period. Nothing flashy or too modern. I did want to depict a difference in how my characters were dressed before and after the announcement about freedom. Some of the clothing was inspired by my love of African fabric and styles.

What is your favorite illustration in the book?
I love them all for one reason or another, but my favorite is the illustration of Huldah high up in her favorite tree, catching a sunbeam. It is such a visually stunning illustration. I love how big the sun is in comparison to Huldah. She bravely faces the sun head-on, taking some of its strength and wisdom back home with her in her little jar. In my imagination, the sun represents life and freedom, and that jar is her heart. I fell in love with nature at a very young age, camping every summer in New York’s Bear Mountain and the Catskills. Nature always felt so big to me, yet I was never overwhelmed by it. Instead, I always felt at home and peaceful, just like Huldah.

What aspect of A Flag for Juneteenth are you most proud of?
I am very proud to tell the story of Juneteenth in a way that I hope will encourage children to want to learn more about this historic event. I felt it was critical to highlight the beauty and resilience of African and African American people during their enslavement, as well as to showcase the importance of strong family and community ties. I am also incredibly proud to have illustrated this book with an art form that was used by my ancestors to tell their own stories.

Read our starred review of Kim Taylor’s ‘A Flag for Juneteenth.’

Photo of Kim Taylor courtesy of Erskine Isaac for Ivisionphoto.

The author-illustrator of A Flag for Juneteenth, a picture book illustrated with quilted artwork, describes feeling guided by her ancestors as she created her extraordinary first book.

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