>> Sara Peté: Hello. I'm Sara Peté, comanager of the
Washington Center for the Book, an affiliate of the
Library of Congress. I work at the Washington State
Library, and my comanager, Linda Johns, is at the
Seattle Public Library. The Centers for the Book
helped carry out the mission of the National Center, which
is to promote books, reading, libraries and literacy
nationwide. We also promote our
state's literary heritage by putting a focus
on books and authors with a connection to our states. Every year, as part of our
participation in the Library of Congress National Book
Festival, we each choose a book with a local connection. This is part of the Great Reads
from Great Places initiative. And you can learn
more at read.gov. Today, we are speaking with Great Reads authors
from several states. They were invited by the
affiliated Centers for the Book from California, Nevada,
Rhode Island, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin. It is my great pleasure to
introduce today's authors to you, alphabetically
by the name of the state they are
representing today. So representing California,
Land of the Cranes. Aida Salazar is an award-winning
author, arts activist and translator whose
writings for adults and children explore issues of
identity and social justice. She's the author of the critically acclaimed
middle grade first novels, The Moon Within and
Land of the Cranes, winner of the California Library
Association Beatty Award. Aida is a founding
member of Las Musas, a Latinx kidlit debut
author collective. Her story By the Light
of the Moon was adapted into a ballet production by the
Sonoma Conservatory of Dance and is the first Chicana-themed
ballet in history. She lives with her family
of artists in a teal house in Oakland, California. Representing Nevada,
Closer to Nowhere. Ellen Hopkins is a
poet, former journalist and the award-winning author
of 20 nonfiction books for young readers, 14
bestselling young adult novels and four novels for
adult readers. This is her second
middle grade novel. Ellen lives with
her extended family, two brilliant German shepherds
and a couple of ponds, not pounds, of coy,
in the eastern shadow of the Northern Nevada Sierra. Representing Rhode
Island, Layla's Happiness. Mariahadessa Ekere
Tallie is the author of the award-winning children's
book Layla's Happiness. The poetry collections
Strut and Karma's Footsteps and Dear Continuum: Letters
to a Poet Crafting Liberation. She is a native of Queens, New
York, living in the lovely state of Rhode Island where she
is currently a PhD student in the theater arts and performance arts
program at Brown University. Mariahadessa is the
mother of three galaxies who look like daughters. Representing Virginia,
Your Mama, NoNieqa Ramos is an educator who wrote The Disturbed Girl's
Dictionary, a YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults
selection and an In the Margins Award
Top Ten pick. Her debut picture book Your Mama
earned three starred reviews. She is a proud member of
Las Musas Book collective, the Soaring 20s debut group
and PB debut group 21. She lives in Virginia
with her family. Representing Washington, the
Sea in Winter, Christine Day, Upper Skagit, grew up in
Seattle nestled between the sea, the mountains and the pages
of her favorite books. She is author of I Can Make
This Promise, The Sea in Winter, and She Persisted:
Maria Tallchief, an early reader biography
in a new series inspired by Chelsea Clinton's
bestselling picture book. She was born and raised in
Washington State and continues to live there with her
husband and her daughter. And finally representing
Wisconsin, Ten Ways to Hear Snow. Cathy Camper is the
award-winning author of Lowriders in Space,
graphic novel series, Ten Ways to Hear
Snow, Bugs Before Time and the forthcoming Lowriders
to the Rescue and Arab, Arab All Year Round
coming in 2022. She also writes zines
and is a founding member of the Portland Women of
Color zine collective. An Arab American born
in Madison, Wisconsin, Cathy is a librarian who currently lives
in Portland, Oregon. So thank you all so much
for your beautiful work and for being here with us
today to speak about it. To start today's conversation,
we've asked you all to think about the theme of this
year's festival, open a book, open the world and
what that means to you. What book opened
the world to you? How do your books open
worlds for you readers? So let's hear from each of our
authors starting with Cathy. >> Cathy Camper. Well I was thinking
about this, and I wanted, I realized when I was little
it wasn't even a specific book, but it was that my mom
took us to the library. And that meant piling three
little kids in a red wagon and walking over a
mile to come home with a stack of picture books. But that rotating stack
of books opened my world. It was books that we wouldn't
have had on our shelves, but they lived with
me through life. And they led to me not
only being a writer but a librarian too. >> Sara Peté: Thank you. Aida. >> Aida Salazar:
Well for me it was in the fifth grade I
received a book by my teacher, which I still have,
and it's right here. And it's super old, and it says
this book belongs to Aida still. And it's Where the Sidewalk
Ends by Shel Silverstein. And this book has been
read so many times, and it was my first
book of poetry and my first book I ever
owned, and I adore it. So this book opened up
the world of poetry to me. It opened up the possibility
of play and imagination in the world and in expression. So and that's my relationship
to writing and to reading. That's how I come to
language and literature. Because I think that's the power
of being able to open a book and kind of explore, play, travel and so I'm
grateful to Mr. Clark. Shout out Mr. Clark
wherever you are. >> Sara Peté: Thank you. Ellen. >> Ellen Hopkins: It was
my mom also, by the way. But she read to us
when we were little. And she, like I think I
was the first five year old that could quote Dickens. So for me, it was Dickens,
it was Great Expectations. It was Going to England. And then it was just the
adventures, you know, of the dull classics, Treasure
Island and Moby Dick and those, you know, high seas adventures
that said hey, you know what, even a girl can get on a
boat somewhere sometime. And then later, because my mom
really did let us read whatever we wanted, it was books
like Shogun and Thorn Birds and these great romantic
adventures that allowed me as a teenager to go to Japan
and to go to New Zealand and Australia just to
understand, by the way, I grew up in California, that there was a place
besides California somewhere out there for me. And so yeah, but I give my
mom credit for that as well. >> Sara Peté: Thank you. NoNieqa? >> NoNieqa Ramos: So my
mind went to so many places with this question, and I
thought about what it meant for me as a child growing
up with a situation where there was absolutely
no representation of Latinx families or
queer families of any kind. And also kind of thinking about
the fact that the representation that would have existed was so
flawed and deeply stereotyped. So I would never see a single
father like mine shown in media or shown in books or in any
way in a positive light. So when I thought of this
question I thought of him going to work two, three
days sometimes in a row as a lab technologist,
sometimes not sleeping but always having a book
tucked under his arm. And it was always a
giant book wrapped in a wrinkled Barnes & Noble
bag, and he was always sort of finding that time to
read his sci-fi, you know, to read the Wizard of
Earthsea is one book that came to my mind. And kind of that was
normal for me and many, many other kids growing
up in The Bronx. But that's nothing that you
would have seen represented that we were all seeing our
parents working maybe two, three, four shifts, but
still having those books, still having the
art in their lives. So I think that that's what
started me on my journey of understanding that
the world was bigger than what was being
presented to me. >> Sara Peté: Thank you. Christine. >> Christine Day: My mind
also kind of went all over the place trying to
figure out how to respond to this question because I think
that for a lot of us who appear on panels like this, we are
asked some variation of it. It's something that people
love to talk about is where did your love
of reading come from, and what do books
really mean to you? And it's such a big
all-encompassing part of my life and part of my identity as
a reader and as a writer that it is actually a little
ironically really hard to put into words. And so for me, I ended up
thinking a lot about the mirrors and windows that we
often compare books to. Because it can be such a
powerful experience to see parts of yourself reflected
on the page and to encounter a character
who thinks or feels in ways that really resonate with you. But also to meet characters
who life experiences and whose settings and
surroundings are so different from yours that it does
transport you to another place. Whether it's a more fantastical
world or the state of Arizona for someone like me who
grew up in Washington. So for me, yeah, I just
think that through reading and through sharing
books and through talking about our favorite books, the opportunities
are really limitless. And that is very exciting. So yeah. >> Sara Peté: Thank you. Mariahadessa. >> Mariahadessa Ekere
Tallie: Yes. Wow, so much richness already. I think about this
question, and it's funny, I felt very much like, you
know, NoNieqa initially. I thought, I wrote the
word closed down, right, because I would look in
the books that I had, and they were a lot
of fairytales, right. So Snow White, Cinderella,
right, these things where I didn't see myself. I didn't see myself
reflected in any way, right. No mirror. And so it's strange
that I ended up, still I really loved reading. And I really loved writing. And so I think for me I used to just write myself
into a lot of things. But for me the first book
that like blew open the doors that I can remember was a
book that I got in high school from a counselor at talent
search, Double Discovery Center at Columbia University. Big up to Jonathan, wherever he
is, right, very much like Aida. And Jonathan said, I think
you should read this. Because I was reading a lot of
Stephen King and R. L. Stein, and he was like, oh, you
should check this out. And I was like, what is this? And it was the autobiography
of Malcolm X. And so the autobiography of Malcolm X was a life
changer for me, right. It gave me context for
why I felt the ways that I felt about myself. Gave me context for why I
sometimes didn't see myself in certain spaces. And it really helped me to move
forward with a sense of pride and who I was and what
my identity was, right. It gave me an identity
before enslavement. So it was super powerful, right. Total gamechanger. And I would say the other book
that really helped me in terms of opening a world
was The Alchemist. That came later, but
The Alchemist was just, that was mind blowing
in another way, right. Like it just opened
this whole world to me like the universe is conspiring
to bring me these wishes of writing and connecting
with readers. Whoa, right. So just so many worlds did
open to me through books. But it's important to have
someone who helps to guide you to the books that could
open the world instead of closing it towards you. >> Sara Peté: Thank you. Can each of you tell us a bit
about what led you to the story? And can we start with NoNieqa? >> NoNieqa Ramos: So, I
want to answer that question but also kind of start off with
where we left, which is lens. So the other thing I thought
about with opening up books and opening up worlds, it's so
important the lens that comes through and firsthand accounts. So when I'm looking around
this space, Mariahadessa and Christine and Cathy,
and even Ellen and us, we're providing a particular
lens that's so important to kids, and we're
opening up doors. And I can't understand Aida's
world without listening to Aida's story specifically
from her. And so why is this important? I think it's important
to think about the words that have been used in the
past just humanizing people, humanizing marginalized people
which I'm going to start there. But also pivot to
what we really want, which is to get beyond
humanizing human beings and get beyond empathy. But to move to the
point of connection. And so we're all talking
about is connection. Connection with the
human family. Connection with who
we are as siblings on this planet is what I
think of of opening doors. And so when, you know,
I have Your Mama here, and I talk a little bit
about the fact that I grew up in a single parent household. But that wasn't just
my household. That was the household of
many people in my family, and that was the household of
many children in my school. And when you're looking
at those kids, whenever they were seeing
single parent families, parents remarrying, they
were seeing a very limited perspective of that. Of basically where the
page was stuck on trauma, or the page was stuck on issues. ABC Afterschool Special issue. Kids couldn't turn the page
past that to see healing or to see pure joy or
just the sequel of joy. And so to me, there
certainly was struggle growing up in a house, and I'm sure
many of us can understand that whether it was in our
own lives or people we loved. You know, when you have
families transitioning, families changing
their situations. But I do want to say
when I wrote Your Mama, I was starting off with the
joy, and I was starting off with what it's really all about
which is wealth of family, wealth of community
and wealth of bond between caregiver and child. So I wanted to kind
of start the sequel of the story we've been
hearing over and over and over so that every kid can look
and say that's where I am. This is the point where I
am or where I'm going to be. Because opening doors
is opening possibility. >> Sara Peté: Thank you. Does anybody else want
to jump in on the theme of our panel is family. And that's, you know,
how books we chose from these particular
states came together. Would anybody else
like to speak to that? >> Ellen Hopkins: I'll jump in. For me, my first novel,
teen novel, was Crank, and it was inspired by my daughter's
journey with addiction. And that was a several
decade long thing. She's doing well now,
but it took her about two and a half decades to
find herself and be okay. And in that time period,
we adopted, my husband and I adopted her first baby. There were seven children
along that journey, and we took guardianship
of three more. One of them came to us with PTSD
from early childhood trauma, and he came pretty damaged. I mean his behaviors were
like very hard to deal with unless you had some
kind of understanding of why, like PTSD when too much comes
at him, he would like pull off into a corner and pull
up his hoodie or fall onto the floor yelling
and screaming. So he got to, came to
us in fourth grade. And never could make friends. Like he's a junior
in high school now. He's finally, you know, pulled
himself through that too. But when you're that
kid in the classroom, nobody wants to be your friend. And that kind of
reputation follows you, and it doesn't matter how
you grow, how you heal, for a lot of those kids
that saw him just there, they never game him
the second chance. So this book is very much
an, I want to honor him. It's not his story, but
it's a child like him who can't control his
behaviors all the time. But he's got a huge heart. He's really bright. He wants to do great
things, right. And so that's what this kid is. And he comes to live
with his cousin who is like the kid that's
got everything. And so she doesn't want
to deal with him either. But over the course of their
getting to know each other, learning to love each other
despite their differences, that's what the book is. So it's a real tribute to
kids who have a hard time, not just to kids who have a
hard time dealing with real life but to the kids who have a hard
time dealing with those kids, if that makes any sense to you. So it's really about opening
your minds, opening your hearts, allowing hopefully that my
readers will look beyond the behaviors into what's
good about, we all have such
great parts of us, even despite all our problems. I've got a few of those
myself, so I get it too. But that's how I came
writing this book. And so I love the characters, and I hope my readers will
love the characters too. >> Sara Peté: Thank you. Aida? >> Aida Salazar:
Yeah, well, you know, I came to this book a little
bit by the news and a little bit by what we were experiencing
as a community and four million undocumented. I came here as a an infant and
grew up undocumented until I was about 13, 12 or 13 years old. So essentially, my
whole childhood. And I grew up very in tune with
this idea of not belonging, of being illegal,
which was the term that was used very
readily back then, mojada [phonetic]
or whatever it was. And so my community is a
community of documented and undocumented folks
being in the United States. And when the Trump
administration came into power, they started coming
after sanctuary states. And so California being a
sanctuary state was one of them. And I lived in the Bay
Area, and there was a moment where the mayor of Oakland
warned the community that ICE was going to be coming
in and raiding, mass raiding. And so the community
was terrified. I mean literally, it was terror. And despite the mayor's warning,
they rounded up 300 people in one day from the street,
vending, taking their children to school, at their work. So, this was the climate
that I was feeling. And because this is my
community, I was very, very impacted by these
actions of terror by the Federal Government
against undocumented folks. And so it was in that climate
that I was sitting to write and doing my practice, and I was
studying a book about the loss of a grandparent when my
pen wrote deportation. And all of a sudden there
was a child there telling me their story. And they told me what they
liked to eat and how they, what their family was like. What their father told them. And the child didn't
have a name until, so I wrote about 30 pages. Those first 30 pages
are almost identical to what you see in
the story today. And I went into a performance, and they were honoring
this activist, a Chicana activist
named Betita Martinez. And Betita, that name and
that power and that spirit of Betita kind of came to life. And it just, it gelled
really easily. And so this story is about a
little girl who is undocumented, and her father gets
deported, and then she and her mother subsequently
end up in a detention center. And she writes picture poems
to express what she's feeling and what she's seeing
inside detention. And it's an act of resistance
for her to speak out, at least in any way that she
can against the brutality and the inhumanity of
incarcerating children and families for a
misdemeanor offense. So that's where that came from. And, you know, I love Betita. Betita Martinez actually passed
away a month ago or something, and you know, this book is
dedicated in part to her. >> Sara Peté: Thank you. Mariahadessa? >> Mariahadessa Ekere
Tallie: So, in 2005, I had my first daughter. And I was looking
around for books that reflected our
family, right. Very strange kind of family,
artists, dreamers, right, and I wasn't finding
those books. And so I decided to
start writing them, because I already wrote poetry. So that's what I did. But it wasn't until
I wrote this, 2012 was when I wrote
Layla's Happiness, right. So I had like three other Layla
stories that I was working on. And I would go back
and forth in them, and I would think this
is the story, right. This is going to be the story. But Layla's happiness
just happened. And I've come to think
about it over time. Like I talked to my
publisher about it. You know, you work
with a character, you get to know a
character, right. It's development,
and it's process. And so I've said
a couple of times, I don't think you'll ever
see the other Layla stories because this was
the story, right. So it was written in 2012. And then 2015 it
went under contract and then didn't come
out until 2019. And it's just been this
whole journey with me and this little girl, right. This little girl who little by little just revealed
her family, right. There are other stories where you see other
things happening, right. Like I can't say what they are, but they're other
things that happen. And so I've seen her
go through problems. I've seen her, you know, at her
dad's office, well his work. It's not an office, but
I've seen her there. But this moment where she's just
expressing happiness, right. That came as a huge kind
of like surprise to me. The book just, it was
a complete surprise. So yeah, I mean I think Layla
just revealed herself over time, and that's how she
ended up coming to me. Really, really wild, right,
to feel like all these voices in your head telling you
these stories, right. Strange. >> Sara Peté: Thank you. Christine. >> Christine Day: So I think
that a lot of the stories that I've written so far have
come from some combination of my personal experiences
and also things that I want to see
more in books. So for The Sea in Winter, it
is about a girl named Maisie who is a young, very
serious ballet student. And she has a knee injury that
takes her away from her practice and away from her
studio and her friends and her entire life there for several months before
the story even begins. And so we sort of pick up the
story of when she is going through the long arduous process
of healing, both physically and mentally and emotionally. And this was partially inspired
by some of my own experiences. I also grew up doing ballet. She is a young Native girl with different tribal nation
affiliations than I have, but I am a young Native girl
who grew up sort of separated from the community and growing
up in the suburbs of Seattle. Which is a bit more of like
her experience and a bit more of the experiences of the
characters I've written. And so there's all these things that I was drawing
inspiration from. Another thing I really
wanted to see more in books was happy
blended families. Because I think that
when I was growing up, I remember reading
all these books where like the stepparents
are just like evil. Or they are the source
of a lot of strife and conflict in book very often. And I wanted a different
interpretation of that, because the people I know in
my life who become stepparents or step into that role for a
young child are always seem to be just doing their best. And I think that
it can be a special and beautiful relationship
between someone who meets this parent
that comes into their life when they are a kid rather than when they are
just born themselves. I think that's such
a beautiful thing. So I really wanted to
show this blended family where the main character never
directly calls her stepfather her stepfather or her little
brother her half-brother. That those labels
are just sort of, they don't even exist
in the book. You won't actually find
them written out in that particular text anywhere,
even though it's very explicit that that's the relationship. Those are some of the things
that I sort of grew from, and it was a really, really
quite the amazing process going through and writing this book. Kind of as Mariahadessa
just said. You know, of letting
the character sort of reveal themselves
to you over time. And it was a very different type
of writing experience for me because this was my fist
book that was actually under contract before I
had started writing it because I was lucky
enough my first book sold in a two-book deal. And so I Can Make This Promise
was pitched to my publisher. They picked it up with
the promise of two books because they wanted to show that
they were very serious about me and growing my career. And that was amazing. But then when I actually
finished I Can Make This Promise and turned it into my editor
and then I had to start over from the very
beginning on a whole new book, I wasn't entirely sure
what I wanted to do yet. And there were all these people
who had believed in me so much, and I really cared
about my agent and my editor and my whole team. And it was suddenly very
intimidating and scary to come up with something that
I would love as much and that they would
love as much. And I was also going through
this really weird funk after I turned in I
Can Make This Promise where it was such a loss for me. Which is not how I expected
to feel after turning in my first book that
I worked so hard on. And after I achieved this
dream of getting published that I had been pursuing
basically my entire adulthood. And so I was grappling with all
of those really just weird mix of emotions where so many
things in my life seemed to be going right, and I
should have been really happy, but I was also just
sad sometimes and couldn't really shake
that sadness or that sense of that's a book I'm never
going to work on again. Or this is a book that I
just need to come up with and have it be amazing. And so it was a really
interesting cathartic process for me. And it became even more
so actually when I signed on to write She Persisted
Maria Tallchief for this new series based on Chelsea Clinton's
bestselling picture book because that was the story about
this Native American ballerina who was the fist prima
ballerina in America. And she was the first American
to travel to Europe and to dance on some of the world's biggest
stages, the Paris Opera Ballet. She was the first
American to perform there. And same thing with The
Bolshoi Theatre in Russia. And she was this Native
woman who came from Oklahoma and just worked so hard
and was so amazing. And so to work on
those two stories, this kind of quieter story
of a girl who is grappling with this injury and
with her family and just with her own mixed emotions
about being in middle school and not seeing her friends. And kind of going through this
particular moment in her life versus writing the life story of
this woman who achieved so much and lived so large and
was just an inspiration for so many people for so
many reasons was a really kind of fascinating duality to hold. And so yeah, that is where
The Sea in Winter came from. And it's a book that
I'm really proud of. I think that my craft grew a lot through the process
of writing it. And I hope that people love the
blended family and how I chose to resolve everything with her
ballet lessons and her injury because it is more of what
I wanted to see in books. So there we go. >> Sara Peté: Thank you. Cathy. >> Cathy Camper: So when I,
Ten Ways to Hear Snow is one of those books that took me
decades because I started it, and it was like a poem. And I had this idea,
and it just kind of always was in my notebooks. And I kept working on it. But one of the things, one of
the advantages I had working as a librarian for many years
was seeing a vast amount of books. So I could look at not just
like one book or a few books that had come out, but
we could pull together like 200 books on
certain topics. So some of the things
I started noticing, especially when we started
talking about how we need to verse books was that there
was more than people missing. There was also locations. And one of the things that
started making me really mad was that I wasn't seeing
non-white people in locations where they lived. It was usually in New York. And like I worked at a
big West Coast library, and the picture books
about Black people on the West Coast were zilch. So for my own representation
as an Arab American, most of the books I would see
were in the desert with camels. And my experience growing up
was in the Midwest with snow. And I thought that's something
that I want to start showing. Where are those stories
in the Midwest, the South, the states that aren't all
centered around New York? And what's interesting to me is
that that's a subconscious bias of publishing being centered
in New York to always think that New York is the
most diverse place, and that's where all
our stories occur. So that was one thing that
I worked hard to show, and I even had to talk to
the illustrator and editor because the first
sketches looked like it was on an East Coast neighborhood. And I said Dearborn, Michigan
is the biggest representation of Arabs. Show us. Another thing that I
fought for is to show old people in assisted living
and in nursing homes. Because I think our
fear of aging and our stereotypes were
still showing grandparents down on the farm or living
happily in an extended family. When my reality, the past
couple years I have visited so many relatives and friends
sorting through assisted living or nursing homes but also
not having that be horrible. Seeing joyous and fun things. So when my little girl, Layna,
goes to make grape leaves with her grandma, she goes to
an assisted living facility. And that was something I just
wanted to give visibility to. And the last thing I
wanted to shout out is that as some other authors
here have mentioned, the past four years have
been horrendous with Trump, and we know how both
Latinx people and Muslims were
immediately persecuted. But that led to when
I look at Arab books, many of them are explaining
the Muslim religion. And that's great,
and it's necessary under that kind of situation. But tons of us aren't Muslim,
and we're not religious. And also, I wanted books that
just didn't talk about religion. Just showed us doing stuff
and living our lives. So in my book, it's just
not stated what religion the family is. And I think if you are
Muslim or Christian or not particularly religious,
the story still works. So I wanted to do a shout out
for a lot of these other things that are connected to who
we are, our ethnicities, but also where we
are and how we live. Because I think that
those stories need to change and be more visible. >> Sara Peté: Thank you so much. It's a good segue into
our next question, which is how does your
book relate to your states? So, let's start with NoNieqa. >> NoNieqa Ramos: And as usual,
I'm going to pivot a little bit, because I don't follow
directions very well. But I'm really inspired so
much of what I'm hearing from Cathy and everyone. You know, there have been
too many times in my life when I have had to send my
White spouse into spaces to be treated with respect. And when you were talking,
that's where my brain went. And when I know that
if I'm going to go, I'm going to have a
very different response. And it's extremely painful. And so I wanted to go to some of
the illustrations for a second because Jackie Alcantara,
the illustrator of Your Mama, portrayed a person, a woman
who could be construed as single, or maybe she's queer. We don't know. She's tattooed, okay. She's darker brown, youthful. She dresses very fashionably. And it's funny because why
are these things relevant? Because oftentimes, the person
that I [inaudible] depict and so gorgeously
and so respectfully on these pages is the person
who has trouble being treated with respect in schools, is the
person who has trouble walking into a store and not having
someone trail them to see if they're shoplifting
is me in some ways. And I think of myself as
somebody who has a master's in fine arts and a
master's in education, 15 years of teaching experience,
and I will still be treated like trash when I walk
into certain spaces by the way I'm yelled at, the
way he will make assumptions. And I'm an empowered person,
because I have resources now. But I think about all of the
people, all of the parents, all of the single parents,
all of the marginalized Brown and especially darker
parents, Black parents, who don't have what I now
have and what I've worked for. They don't have it. And so when I look at Your Mama
I think that mama is the mama that I wanted to see
and respect and adore and talk about self-care. Because the mama in
these pages has a day. If you turn to the middle of the book it says sometimes
your mama is cray-cray because half of this year,
especially, but always for women of color, and in
particularly for Black women, I'm representing Latinx women. But I do want to speak to the
fact that it's always harder with colorism in our society. Okay. We have not
honored these women. We've rendered them invisible when they are the most vital
forces in their communities. And so when I think about
Virginia and I think about how this book
represents my state, I think about how it honors
mothers and mother figures. How it smashes the
paycheck of your mama's so sweet she could be a bakery. Your mama is so woke
that she could stand by and watch injustice. Nope. These are the
women that I'm honoring. And these are the women
that I'm putting forth when I'm honoring my state. And I'm honoring the caregivers,
because as I've said before, you know, my mama was my father. My mama was my madrina. My mama was my thyez [phonetic]. My mama was my babysitter. That was a community. And oftentimes, we have to kind
of put front and center the idea that daddies are mamas. We have to think more about how
we construe gender roles even. And so for me, I see a man when
I see this cover oftentimes. My poppy with a mustache is
who I see on these pages. So when I think about Virginia,
I think about the mothers in the homes who were
virtual schooling and working and writing books and taking
care of their children, all the children, foster
children, adopted children, biological children,
the children. The mamas who were
homeschooling. The mamas who are doing all
these things with their kids at home and then
cleaning the schools. Making the schools sanitary
for our children to now go. So mothering through
their brooms. Mothering through
their cleaning. You know, I'm thinking
of the moms who are doing all these things. They're marching. They're cooking. They're reading to
the kids at night. And I also want to say that it
doesn't mean that I'm saying that mother figures
have to be superhuman. Quite the contrary. In one of the pages
there's a mom taking her kid to the library. I was thinking about all
of you as I was talking about bringing piles of books
into the kids, you know. Making that time. Those are heroic acts. To be able to take time out
of all those responsibilities to do it out of love, to do it
out of empowering these children in these next generations, you
know, that is the true heroism. It's not about saying
we can't take a breath. We can't take time. We can't have a day. It was so important to me in
representing these mothers and in talking about this
state of saying self-care, mental health is so important. If we can't take care of
ourselves, then we can't mother. We can't mother our families. We can't mother our communities. We can't mother this nation. Right now when I'm listening to
everyone talking, Mariahadessa, Christine, Cathy, Aida, Ellen,
we're mothering this nation. It's not just isolated
to ourselves. So that's what I think
about when I think about honoring the
caregivers in my state. >> Sara Peté: Thank you so much. Ellen. Oops, you're still muted, Ellen. >> Ellen Hopkins: I hit
wrong buttons all the time. Sorry. So for me, I mean I've
lived in the West forever. And I think, actually this
book, out of all my books, which many of them
are set in Nevada. This one is set in California. But it's, I'm sort of like
what NoNieqa was saying, it's representative of the West. I mean there's, it's
distance to go anywhere. It's what you see when
you look at the mountains. It's that the ocean
is over there. So it paints a landscape
of the West. And I think, the funny thing
is like when you live in Nevada and you travel, and by
the way, not Nevada, even though that's the correct,
Nevada is what we should say. Here if you say Nevada,
they're like you ain't from around here, are you? You know. So it's,
it's Nevada here. But Nevada is when
you go and travel and you say you let
people know that it snows in Nevada, they're like what? Because everybody that
doesn't live in Nevada or in California thinks Nevada
is Las Vegas, and it's not. There's so much to
it that's not. It's mountains, in fact,
Nevada is, now I've got Nevada, is the most mountainous
state in the country. And people probably
don't know that. But it's the most, north,
south mountain ranges, so if you go east to west, you're doing this
the whole time. People think it's all
desert, and it's not. So it's painting landscapes. It's also, again, opening
up the idea of communities that don't look like what
people think they look like necessarily, you know. It's not all gambling in Nevada. And we ski, and we have rivers. And we do all these
wonderful recreational things that people don't realize
that you can do here. But I agree that the book
really addresses a university, a universality, I guess
that's the right word, right. And humanist and
humanity that the thing that I think we're all talking
about the last four years or five or however many it
was, but what we've lost a lot of is the idea of how
we're alike as humans. And I think that's where we're
really starting to miss now. And it's one thing
that I do think that books can fix, you know. If we can come back to
like how we're alike. No matter what we look like,
no matter where we live, there are ways that
we're all alike. And the main way is
we all want to love, and we all want to
be loved, right. And so that is something that
the guy that lives over there with his sign or his truck
horn blaring or whatever kind of forgets that, you know, we all want the same
things, the basic stuff. And so if we can
come back to that. And books are the one way I
think that we can get there is because we open up minds
and we open up hearts through our characters
having their minds and hearts open as well. So that's what I hope
this book will do and what all these
lovely books will do. Whether they're picture
books or they're novels. And by the way, I just
want to give a shout out to all the poets that
are here because what? Really? Yay to poets and poetry. >> Sara Peté: Thank you. Aida. >> Aida Salazar:
Yeah, well, you know, I was raised in California. And Cathy mentioned how
there's this kind of divide, and the world is not only
exclusively we have this White canon that we've
seen in publishing. But also, it's very,
you know, regional. And so my stories, the majority of my stories take
place in California. And this one is especially
rooted in California because we have 16
million Latina people, you know, living in California. We're the largest ethnic
group in California. We outnumber White
people in the state. And if you were to
look at Hollywood, that's never represented
in either on screen or behind the screen. If you look at publishing,
that's never represented. And if you look at the nation as
a whole, there are three states where school age
children outnumber, Latina school age children
outnumber any ethnicity. And so you are a racial group. And so it's really, you know, a tragedy that we don't
see more representations. So this book is about an
undocumented family that is so typical in this
state, in California. And there are 2 million
undocumented families and people in the state of California. And so it represents a reality. And that's, or like me, I
used to be undocumented. I'm no longer, but that
was my life growing up. And of course, I was never in
a detention center, though, you know, the United
States and Mexico border at California has been like
a huge wound in the history of migration in this country. And I wanted to point to that. I wanted us to kind of be
really clear that, you know, the migration of peoples in the Americas has
happened before the conquest. And this book because it's about this mythical homeland
called Aztlan, which is, you know, some people
say was in the Southwest. Aztlan means land of the cranes. And the prophecy said that
the Aztecs would descend from this area and move
down to found a great nature in the center of the universe, which is [foreign language]
modern day Mexico City. But the prophecy said that
one day they would come back to their homeland, to
the land of the cranes. And so that's what
this book is about. We're back in the
land of the cranes. It is like every species who
migrates for their wellbeing and for their safety
and for abundance, that's what people need to do. And we, I think, as a society
and as human, as a human family, as NoNieqa said,
we have to be able to have compassionate policies. Have, you know, different
solutions for the people who are the victims of,
you know, US imperialism and global warming and, you
know, violence and persecution in their home countries. So because we can, there's
no reason why we shouldn't. And I think we have a
moral obligation to do so. So this book is dedicated to
all the working documented, formerly undocumented
folks in California and all of the Latina folks from
which we descend, right. That history of who we are comes
from that history of migration. And so California is there
in its heart and soul. >> Sara Peté: Thank you. Cathy. >> Cathy Camper: Well I talked
a little bit about how I wanted to show an Arab family
in the Midwest. So Ten Ways to Hear Snow is
about a little girl named Lina who wakes up, and it's snowed. And it, of course, a big
snow has changed everything. And its grape leaf
day when she was going to go make grape
leaves with her grandma. And her grandma is losing her
eyesight and is assisted living. So Lina walks through the
remainders of the snowstorm, and instead of looking, she thinks about how
to hear the snow. And growing up in the Midwest,
snow always to me was amazing with that first big snow because
it could shut everything down, and it was like an
immediate holiday. Like maybe you didn't
have to go to school. People were struggling to
get to work, but as a kid, it was kind of fantastic. And I also have really good
memories of doing things like everybody would get
together and help push a car out or go have, go sliding
in the parks. Or these kind of, it
was like a holiday, but it was unpredictable. And it was put on people,
people didn't control it. And so one of the
things I really liked in writing this book was sort
of sinking deep in nature and thinking about
the sounds of snow. And what it's like
when it snows. And we often connect snow
with holidays like Christmas, but I didn't want to do that. I wanted to keep it just it
could be a snowstorm in March or a snowstorm in November. But I also really,
really love nature, and I think that it's
a restorative thing that people are losing. So it was important to me
to have a girl in the snow with these sensory perceptions
without adults leading her. So I know now many kids never
get to go walk even a few blocks by themselves, but it was really
important to me to have her do that accomplishment but also to
show a child relating to nature and that wonder and
restorative feeling. And I guess I should
just add that that's, I grew up in Wisconsin, and
I'm so touched to have this as a representative book
because I don't know that people even know that there's Arabs
living in Wisconsin. But it was so much a part of my
childhood because winter lasted from October to probably April. So we got plenty of snow. >> Sara Peté: Thank you. Christine. >> Christine Day: Cathy,
I love what you just said about restorative
power of nature, because that's definitely
something that I had in mind when I was writing The
Sea in Winter as well. As I had mentioned before,
this is very much a story about a young Native dancer
who is injured and healing. And some of that comes from her
family and sort of reconnecting with them during this midwinter
road trip they take from, they start from their
home in Seattle and go to the Olympic Peninsula
in Washington State. And around to their sort
of, to her family's kind of tribal territories,
their ancestral homeland, which are closer to the ocean. Specifically, her mother
is from the Makah Nation, and her stepfather is from
the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe. And so yeah, I really
wanted to get some of those sensory details of
Pacific Northwest in February, a time when a lot of people
don't travel here because it's so rainy and because
it's so cold and because it's just not the
time when people go to beaches. Although I wanted to show them
going to beaches and digging for clams and kind of
doing some of these things that Native folks
have been doing here since time in memorial. And I wanted to show
just how powerful and restorative those scenes
and those moments are. And I wanted to be really
specific with the geography and with the types of,
you know, flora and fauna that would surround them and
the specific mountain ranges that are at their
backs the whole time and with the Pacific Ocean and how it rushes
up and greets them. All of those different things. And yeah, I also really wanted
to emphasize all of this from the contemporary
Native perspective because when I was growing up, and I know that kids still learn
a lot about Lewis and Clark and their journey West
and what that looks like in the curriculum
and in the textbooks. And in how people talk about Western movement
in this country. And it's this sort
of romantic idea of these hearty White
settlers moving across and making it all the way
to the very Western age of this continent which
was so wild and beautiful and basically ready to
manifest destiny, right. And I think that there
is actually some kind of, a couple of stories worked into
The Sea in Winter that I want to acknowledge about
Chief Seattle and the Duwamish people actually
welcoming the Denny party when they first made
it to the Seattle area and how they literally kept
them alive by feeding them clams and showing them how to
live off of the land here because they arrived in the
middle of winter and their women who had babies were so malnourished they
were not producing milk to feed their children. And so if it weren't for them
and their generosity, those, you know, settlers wouldn't
have actually survived. And so that was, I
wanted to introduce some of that sort of history. And I also wanted to show,
because it is so often left out, just how deep and rich the
histories were here before any of that even happened. So the places that they
go to, like they stay in a motel in Port Angeles. And Port Angeles is
actually the site of this really historic
Klallam village that archeological digs have,
you know, unearthed basically, you know, relics of their
civilization that date back as far back as Ancient Rome. That is how deep the histories
are here and how a lot of these paths and
trails that people take to go West were there from, you
know, indigenous trading routes. And a lot of these movements
sort of already existed. And there was such
thriving communities. And then there was
also a lot of hardships and tragedies too
with, you know, mudslides that took
out entire villages. And all sorts of
things that happened. All of these really
fascinating things. And so for me, I wanted to
really honor Washington State by showing what a
vibrant, beautiful, diverse writing place it is now because I love the
Pacific Northwest so much. And because I do think it's
really wonderful that people from all walks of
life come here. And for a lot of people, this
is sort of a sanctuary state for undocumented folks, for
refugees from other places. For, again, all backgrounds. I think that it's important to
recognize that this is a home for all of those people. But there also is a home for
Native folks who might not have, you know, we might not be
recognized in the same sort of way our history has been. It is true that, you know, there
are only about 1% of Native kids in most urban and suburban
schools and stuff like that, but they are still here. We are still here,
and our histories and our perspectives
still matter very much. And our nation to nation
relationships are still very relevant and important. The COVID-19 vaccines
were distributed here to our tribal folks first. You know, my family was
able, we were invited to go and get vaccinated
before the state was able to vaccinate people
in my age group. And all around here, you know, the Quinault Nation was
vaccinating educators and people who wouldn't, within their
county and within their region, because they had an excess
if vaccines and they wanted to vaccinate as many
people as possible. And so yeah, to me,
I just wanted to show the Native
nations that are here because they're also diverse. And just show all of that. It's like a kaleidoscope
in its complexity. And I'm sure I only got a little
glimmer of it in this book. But yeah, it is really
an honor to be chosen to represent Washington State
because I love this place so much, and it means
so much to me. And yeah, I can't imagine
living anywhere else. So. >> Sara Peté: Thank you. Mariahadessa. >> Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie:
Yes, I thank you for leaving me for last, I really do,
because this is a tough one. And Kate from the Rhode
Island Center for the Book, and you all know why, right. I'm new in Rhode Island. I've only been living in
Rhode Island for like, what, two or three years. And so when I wrote this book,
I was home in New York, right. And so the Rhode Island
Center for the Book's embrace of the book is actually what
allowed me to see the connection between Layla's Happiness
and Rhode Island. It's such a trip. Like I have spent this entire
pandemic time doing a couple of things that have
brought me joy. And one of them is, of course,
going to the beach, right. Rhode Island is the Ocean State. And so one of my favorite pages in Layla's Happiness
is this one, shout out to my girl,
Ashleigh Corrin. This page where Layla and
Juan are at the beach, and Layla says the ocean,
right, reaches into her pocket to give a sand dollar. And every time I get to that
page, I feel so much comfort. And that's one of the things
that I get from moving around the beaches in
Rhode Island, right. I had this experience where
I was going to the library on the southside, southside
of Providence, and I got out. I was going to read Layla's
Happiness to a group of kids, but virtually, right,
because of the pandemic. And so there's a page in Layla's
Happiness where Layla talks about being able to
feed chickens, right, give all the trees names. And she talks about the
community garden down the block. So literally when my husband
and I got out of the car, there were chickens and roosters
right in somebody's yard across the street
from the library. And there's a community
garden down the block from the southside
Providence Library, right. So you start to see
these connections, right. And one of the things
that I think I was, before you move here, you don't
know who lives here, right. You have no idea. And so coming here, there
are all these little Laylas running around. There are all these
little black girls, right, running around here. Black Americans, some,
but a lot of children from Cape Verde, right. A lot of Dominican children. And so you start to
realize like oh man, there really is a connection. There's a farmer's market
where people are going. It's kind of in the city. And you see the children
really connecting, connecting with nature, connecting with their
communities, connecting with their families. One of the things I like
about Providence in particular in Rhode Island is that
we also have space. We have space, and we have
quality time with each other, which is something that
we didn't really have, right, where I was. We are busy doing the
grind and the hustle. And so Layla gets to
spend a lot of time, like you see her just taking
moments, right, taking moments to enjoy chasing her friend
Juan and seeing butterflies. And those are things that
I really enjoyed doing since I moved here as well. And so now, right, two years,
three years later, right, and also because, again,
the Rhode Island Center for the Book chose the
book, and I was like, what, are you kidding me? Wow, what a huge honor,
right, what a huge privilege. I'm new here, and you
all are like giving so much love to the book. It's just such a huge blessing. And so I started to see the
connections more the more I moved around. And I also have to
say the people here from day one just gave
the book a lot of love. It was kind of shocking, right. We have a book party
and like all my people from here were just buying up
the book in multiple copies and like brought the kids. And yeah, it's just
a huge blessing. So I'm really grateful to Rhode
Island Center for the Book and Rhode Island for embracing
me and Layla and her gifts. So yeah, that's how I think
Layla's Happiness represents Rhode Island. Big up, Providence. >> Sara Peté: Thank
you all so much. We have already reached an hour. It went by like this for me
listening to all of you talk about your brilliant work. Thank you so much
for sharing your work with your states
and with the world. And thank you so much for being
here and giving us some glimpses into your brilliant minds. Thank you very much. >> Aida Salazar:
Thank you so much. >> Mariahadessa Ekere
Tallie: Thank you. >> NoNieqa Ramos: Thank you. >> Christine Day:
Anna, thank you. >> Cathy Camper: Thanks. And it was wonderful being
here with everyone else, too.
