I'm thrilled that our upcoming book was featured on the wonderful John Schu's blog Watch. Connect. Read:
John Schu's kind introduction:
"Hello, Jeanne Walker Harvey! Hello, Diana Toledano! Thank you for stopping by Watch. Connect. Read. to celebrate and discuss Dressing Up The Stars: The Story of Movie Costume Designer Edith Head, your dazzling picture book biography. I became a reader because of movies, TV shows, and movie and TV tie-in books. I learned so much about cinema and costume design from your book. I would have checked it out from the library multiple times as a child. "
I loved seeing Diana Toledano's sketch ideas for the cover:
Read more of the interview here:
What William Morris Made
A TRUE TALE WITH
A CHERRY ON TOP
Cameron Kids
(Abrams)
(pub. 4.5.22) pages
Author: Beth Kephart
Illustrator: Melodie Stacey
Character: William Morris
Overview: "William Morris is best known for his colorful wallpapers and textiles, inspired by the English forests and wild foliage where he grew up. But did you know this icon of the Arts and Crafts Movement was also a poet, a painter, a preservationist, an activist, an environmentalist, and a maker of many other beautiful useful things, like books?"
Tantalizing taste:
" Every one thing was part of another something –
the leaf, a part of the stem;
the bird, a part of the song;
the garden, a part of the house;
the house, a place for people to love and to live,
to meet and to think.
It takes a long time for a tree to become a tree,
for a vine to twine,
for a flower to bloom
for a thread to become a tapestry.
The older William grew,
and the more he saw,
the more he wanted
to honor beauty
by making beautiful things."
And something more: Melodie Stacy in the Illustrator's Note, explains that "I have long admired William Morris, not only as a designer and maker, but as a person. I've admired his artistic vision, his love of beauty in all things, but also his philanthropy and his fight for better working conditions and pay for his employees... In illustrating this book I was inspired both by his designs and the way he seemed to recall patterns in nature from my childhood in the East Anglian countryside surrounded by woods and a wealth of wildflowers, but also his love of collaboration and the importance of family and friendship."
A Life of Edwin Hubble
A TRUE TALE WITH
A CHERRY ON TOP
Enchanted Lion Books
(pub.1.19.2021) 52 pages
Author: Isabelle Marinov
Illustrator: Deborah Marcero
Character: Edwin Hubble
Overview:
"This is the story of Edwin Hubble, a boy fascinated by the stars who surmounted many hurdles to follow his dreams of becoming an astronomer. Using the insights of great mathematicians and endlessly observing the sky, he succeeded in confirming two things that altered human life forever: that there are more galaxies than our own, and that the universe is always expanding. Hubble’s message to us is to find peace in the vastness of the mystery surrounding us, and to be curious. “We do now know why we are born into the world,” he said, “but we can try to find out what sort of world it is.”
Tantalizing taste:
" Thinking,
Wondering.
Measuring.
Calculating.
On some days, his fingers and toes grew numb and tears froze his eyelashes to the telescope's eyepiece. but nothing could lure him back inside.
And then, in 1923, he found what he had been looking for.
Inside the Andromeda nebula, Edwin discovered a pulsating star that brightened and dimmed like a lighthouse beacon. He was able to measure the distance between Andromeda's blinking star and the Earth because of the incredible work of Henrietta Swan Leavitt, a brilliant astronomer at the Harvard Observatory...
The measurements told Edwin that the star was very, very far away. So far that it couldn't possibly be within our galaxy."
And something more: Isabelle Marinov, in the Author's Note, writes: "...Hubble redefined our place in the cosmos. Why hadn't I known this? Why do we know so much about Napoleon and other military figures, and so little about the man who discovered that the universe is so much bigger than anyone ever imagined?... And the universe is constantly expanding ...
Our universe may not be the only one. We could be part of a multiverse of co-existing universes.
It is this cosmic perspective that I've tried to convey through Edwin's story, a perspective that is lost on so many of our world's leaders. Planet Earth is nothing more than an infinitesimal fraction of a mote of dust in the vast cosmic tapestry. Maybe one day, this realization will help us overcome our narrowness of perspective, which lies at the root of so many of our earthly problems."