On Sunday, July 21, President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 race for the White House, ending his bid for reelection; he quickly endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris and encouraged his party to unite behind her.
As these unprecedented events unfolded, creative collaborators and best friends Raakhee Mirchandani and Supriya Kelkar knew it was their moment, too. “We’d talked about [writing a book about Harris] over the course of two years,” Mirchandani said. “We’d had different ideas for it, but the timing just wasn’t right. That Sunday, I got the story. Kamala has raised her hand over the course of her life, from when she was 12 years old to just weeks ago when the United States needed a president. This is a woman who has continuously raised her hand for her community.”
Little, Brown Books for Young Readers is crashing their picture book, Kamala Raised Her Hand, about Harris’s historic run, onto its fall list, with a release date of October 29, one week before the election. “I got Rakhee’s email on Monday with the subject line, ‘Kamala Raised Her Hand…’,” said LBYR editor Samantha Gentry. “And then in its body, it said, ‘I think we need the picture book.’ I immediately went to talk to my editorial director. We honestly didn’t think it was even going to be possible!I have done a few crashed books in my career, but nothing that has been this quick.”
Once Gentry received the go-ahead, Mirchandani wrote the manuscript overnight. “It was so clear to me what the story was,” she said. “I knew how I wanted the words to sound when someone would read it out loud. I’ve spent my whole career in newspapers. I love a fast deadline. This was great for me.”
Kelkar, on the other hand, felt the pressure of the timeline: publication depended on whether or not she could produce 40 pages of art in less than two weeks. She spent the next nine and a half days illustrating nonstop. “I slept an hour each night,” Kelkar said. “I had the Olympics on in the background so I wasn’t lonely. Raakhee and my agent sent me lots of sugar to fuel me through this process.”
Kelkar’s collage art relies on the colors of the American flag, as well as a recurring lotus motif (“Kamala” is Sanskrit for lotus). “I used shades of red, white, or blue for every background,” Kelkar said. “I used Indian fabrics to make the red and white stripes on the cover, to serve as a reminder that in our multitudes, in our hyphenated identities, every single one of us is a vital part of the fabric of this country. It was about reclaiming the colors that, for several years now, sometimes made me feel scared if I saw certain people wearing them.”
Mirchandani and Kelkar’s steadfast friendship, cemented through 24/7 texts during Covid lockdowns, was instrumental in making their tight deadline, the pair said, as was Gentry’s trust in their creative partnership. Kamala Raised Her Hand is Mirchandani and Kelkar’s second picture book with LBYR after My Diwali Light (2022). “There is nothing better than creating something that you’re proud of, that you’re excited for, and that you love with someone you love and are proud of,” Mirchandani said. “It’s an absolute dream to work with a friend. I thought you only get to do that in school on a group project, and I get to do it as an adult two times.”
Kamala Raised Her Hand marks the many times Harris raised her hand—to protest war and apartheid on her college campus or to advocate for women and children and marriage equality in court. The book has an ambiguous ending, given the timing of its publication, but both creators and Gentry believe that the book stands on its own regardless. “The point is still the point: there are things worth raising your hand for,” Mirchandani said. LBYR has discussed what might need to be edited “if she does win and we’re lucky enough to reprint the book,” Gentry said. “Even if that is the case, the book can still speak to that. It leaves it open to interpretation.”
Gentry said that it was an “all hands on deck” situation in the LBYR offices. “I was texting with Supriya while I was on a family trip,” she said. “Raakhee was sending the copy editor her source notes. Our team wanted to be first to market and it was important to us to get the book out before the election.”
The process, poetically, reinforced to Mirchandani and Kelkar the importance of raising one’s hand—the very theme of the book. “We raised our hands,” Mirchandani said. “I sent an email. I didn’t wait for someone to contact me. I didn’t even email my agent first. I’m so proud of us that we took that chance. And I’m so proud of Little, Brown. Everyone talks about how slow publishing can be sometimes. You know what? Everything happened really quickly, because everybody wanted to do this.”
Gentry concurs. “When a book is speaking to something as timely and topical as this moment in our history, you kind of have to do everything you can to make it happen.”
