Headlines used to be about information, about what was going on in the world. I remember those times with nostalgia. Possibly the world was a clown show back then as well, and I just wasn’t paying attention.

This year, I listened to the audiobook of Patriot, the posthumously published memoir of Russian democracy activist and opposition leader Alexei Navalny. I expected this to be tough listening. How could it not be, since I knew all the horrible things that had been done to its writer? I braced myself.

Then the opening whacked me over the head.

Karen Leggett Abouraya and Susan L. Roth have collaborated on picture books for years. Yes, collaborated, which isn’t something authors and illustrators are known to do in North American publishing. We’re all carefully schooled in detachment in the creation of picture books, right? Here’s a different take on this.

Their picture book, Zamzam, is an ode to family love that reaches its arms around the world, and an exploration of the big and little differences that colour us human. It’s also a verbal-visual collaboration.

When the audiobook of Ann Dávila Cardinal’s novel, The Storyteller’s Death, showed up on my Libby app, a global read, no less, I was overjoyed. I know Ann from our time together at VCFA. (She’s recently joined the faculty of a brand new MFA program in Writing for Young Readers at the University of San Francisco.) I know her words are as wide and bold as her laugh. I knew I was in for a treat.

I was immediately drawn into the audiobook, finding myself resenting every pause in the service of mundane tasks. I ended up doing what I rarely ever do—when I finished listening to the audiobook, I got myself a paper copy so I could sense this story the old-fashioned way, by scanning text and turning pages. To keep my conversation with this book going, I’m so pleased to welcome Ann Dávila Cardinal to Writing With a Broken Tusk.

Only in America would a Democratic Socialist candidate cause as much pearl-clutching as Zohran Mamdani managed to set off. Primary voters cast enthusiastic ballots for him, electing him the Democratic candidate in the race. Then came a tidal wave of misinformation and attacks. It felt as if the pushback came precisely because he was trying to be the first millennial, Muslim, Indian-American mayor of New York City.

But Zohran had built a powerful campaign. Volunteers knocked on over a million doors on his behalf. And he had done something else. He’d walked the five boroughs of the city, meeting voters and getting to know their lives and their concerns.

This is the element of Zohran Mamdani’s story that led to today’s delightful picture book, Zohran Walks New York by Millie von Platen (Calkins Creek).

On Freedom is Timothy Snyder’s (On Tyranny) meditation on the nature of people, especially Americans, and the meaning of freedom. Historian Snyder argues that freedom is a concept in need of rescuing from “overuse and abuse.” Americans, he says, have erroneously come to imagine that freedom means no more than a lack of barriers. It ought to mean more, and he sets out to tell us how.

Stargazers Valley is an isolated village where Peter, the young protagonist of The Tinkerers, gazes at stars, listens to stories, and tries not to step on star-eating newts. Peter lives an ordinary kid life in a rural, mountainous setting with astromancers and a magical aurora that is the subject of study. Then strangers arrive, and things get strange. It’s a weirdly wonderful book, funny and unexpectedly touching, and its family and community context is one of its charms. I asked Caroline to tell me more about The Tinkerers.

Among the many voices bringing contemporary Indigenous stories to young readers in North America, one narrative has been conspicuous in its absence. By that I mean stories of relationships between Native American or First Nations characters and those from India—children with very different origins and histories, from very different places on the face of our planet. yet sharing a moniker that is a bitter kind of joke, bestowed upon many diverse communities by the circumstances of colonization. So when I heard about Firefly Season (Heartdrum) by my dear friend and colleague Cynthia Leitich Smith, I knew I'd want to hear more from her about the making of this book.

Children’s Book Press, founded by Harriet Rohmer in 1975, published my second picture book, Chachaji’s Cup, a story set against the history of India’s partition, at a time when American picture books with brown characters were about as rare as flying pigs. When the press closed and the CBP list was acquired by another of my publishers, Lee and Low, it felt like predestination.

This year, Children's Book Press turns 50. In honor of this milestone, I'm reviving an old post from 2010, the year they turned 35, when I traded emails with editors I’d worked with, Janet del Mundo and Dana Goldberg.

In a big-hearted treatment of place and history, akin to Australian writer Nadia Wheatley’s iconic picture book, My Place, Karen Krossing’s latest release, My Street Remembers, is grounded in conceptions of people and place that we’d all do well to reflect upon:

• everyone is part of history and every place has a story worthy of telling.

• story should be told in all its aspects, joyful and sad.

• just as the Earth has layers, so do our histories.

• if we are to grow beyond our worst instincts, those histories must be told and read and talked about.

I'm delighted to welcome Karen Krossing to Writing With a Broken Tusk.

“Where nothing can be named, nothing is.”

In the tradition of novels that play with words (The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster, The Wonderful O by James Thurber, The Neverending Story by Michael Ende) Woebegone’s Warehouse of Words by Payal Kapadia hit me like a—well, like a box of words falling off a warehouse crane. It felt significant to be reading it now in the middle of a time when words are often weaponized and taken away from people in the real world, where words exercise power and judgments are frequently made by the powerful about who ought to use them and when. 

Here’s my conversation with my colleague and friend, Payal Kapadia.