Charly Palmer
Fine artist, graphic designer, and illustrator Charly Palmer, who makes his home in Atlanta, describes the chance to illustrate Kathryn Erskine’s Mama Africa!: How Miriam Makeba Spread Hope with Her Song as “a dream come true.” Having been inspired as a child by the illustrations in Ezra Jack Keats’s The Snowy Day, which to this day informs his own use of color and geometric shapes, Palmer’s life is one of art, design, education, and a passion for history. He ...
The use of line in picture books directs the viewer’s eye across the page, but it also can convey great meaning—just as color, shape, and texture can. Angular lines convey excitement and tension; curved lines express more organic, peaceful qualities. Diagonal lines can communicate spontaneity, and horizontal lines, tranquility. A large part of so-called visual literacy with children is their ability to “read” these elements of art in picture books. It’s a sophisticated thing, and children are very good at ...
Patricia MacLachlan
At nearly 80 years old, very little slows down Patricia MacLachlan. The author, best known for her Newbery Medal-winning novel Sarah, Plain and Tall, is busy gathering memories to tell her fans even more stories – in the form of both picture books and novels for child readers.
In her newest picture book, Someone Like Me, MacLachlan looks back to her childhood, filled with books, stories, and the “smell and feel of prairie earth,” and sees now with clarity ...
Photo courtesy of Tim Stout
Katherine Roy up and won a 2015 Robert F. Sibert Award Honor Book for her meticulously-researched Neighborhood Sharks (also named a Kirkus Best Children’s Book of 2014), which explored, just a few miles from San Francisco, the ocean’s largest predators. Not bad for the first book she both wrote and illustrated.
Now she’s back with How to Be an Elephant: Growing Up in the African Wild, coming to shelves in mid-September. For this—a captivating, fact-filled book all about elephants and ...
Because children possess an inner wildness, children’s literature is full of wild creatures of all sorts and stripes. Two brand-new picture books on shelves, all about wildness, serve as the yin and yang of one another – one story about a tame creature finding wildness; another about a wild creature seeking security.
Michelle Cuevas’s Smoot: A Rebellious Shadow, illustrated by Sydney Smith, is a story of release. “If life is a book,” it opens, “then Smoot the Shadow had ...
Photo courtesy of Blair Mowat
I do my best to temper excessive fan-dom, at least in public, over my favorite authors and illustrators, but the work of author and Oxford fellow Katherine Rundell simply makes me want to gush. Once I read The Wolf Wilder, published in 2015 (which I wrote about here), I was hooked and knew I wanted to backtrack and read the award-winning novels she’d previously written. This didn’t take long, as there were a total of two. I enjoyed them immensely ...
Photo courtesy of Ruth Chan
In Margarita Engle’s All the Way to Havana, illustrated by Mike Curato, a young boy in Cuba sets out with his parents in their noisy old family car to visit his new cousin on his “zero-year birthday.” Driving down potholed streets, beside the farms and beaches and forests of Havana, readers join the boy in taking in the sights and sounds of the city. The boy loves his home and his family, and he has a special fondness for ...
