Riding the wave after his 2015 Newbery win, Kwame Alexander is releasing a picture book, Surf’s Up (NorthSouth), illustrated by Daniel Miyares, next month. “I always felt like it’d be a great book to [follow] the Newbery,” he says. “It wasn’t a middle grade, so it wouldn’t be compared, which took pressure off me.” The book couldn’t be more different from Alexander’s novel-in-verse The Crossover in theme or content: it follows froggy odd couple Bro and Dude, one an avid reader, the other eager to hit the beach, on an adventure that draws both characters into the pages of a book.
While the “book was sold before the Newbery and was already in production,” Alexander says that both he and the team at NorthSouth “realized the value in stepping up our game,” so the book’s slated publication date was moved up immediately after the announcement, from a planned on-sale date of May, to February. Illustrator Miyares called the pub date shift a “Herculean task,” and credits editor Beth Terrill and designer Elynn Cohen, who “were very flexible.”
Moving up the publication date was just one of the variables to creating this book. Miyares also thought a lot about what perspective he would bring to the story. “It needs to be as much me as Kwame. As long as the characters reversed roles by the end, they were open to what would be,” and with that freedom, Miyares considered how the characters would get to their conclusion, thinking: “one [character] is new at using his imagination,” so he tried to find a way to visualize that on the page.
Eventually, Miyares chose to show the characters engaging their imagination in a side story that breaks out of thought bubbles to fill page spreads. The characters immerse themselves in the nautical story they’re reading, with Bro in the captain’s hat and Dude as a deckhand. Miyares says he “saw it as a child would, thinking ‘I want to be captain, too!’ By the end, he has his own captain’s hat.” The scenes Miyares added leveraged the story’s homage to Moby Dick, as well as ensuring that “the dialogue stays true to how Kwame intended it.”
Alexander said his original story “did change directions, and I think that in each of the picture books that I’ve done, I’m very much hands off, once the illustrator takes up the project. That’s what it was like with Daniel. I knew he could pull it off, and I was excited to see what he could bring to the story. I love my words, but certainly a powerful illustrator can bring another story to the story, things I didn’t even know existed. Daniel’s illustration shows that you have to take that leap. And I think he did that. That never would have happened if he didn’t have the freedom and creativity to do his thing. Getting lost in the story, just like a child, that’s exciting to me.”
As far as Alexander’s own intention with the text, he says, “I tried to make the characters clever and witty, and use my poetic background to use very few words to give them personality, [to show their] joy of reading.” Alexander says enjoyed his two new characters so much so that he hopes to create more books with Bro and Dude. For now, he has a middle-grade novel called Booked, a follow up to Crossover, due in April from HMH, and Miyares has Bring Me a Rock coming out in June from Simon & Schuster.
