The annual BookFest at Bank Street, held in partnership with KidLit TV, took place on November 2, making its return to an in-person format for the first time since 2019. The focus of this year’s event, “Why Children’s Books Matter More Than Ever,” was explored in three panels and a keynote speech from Newbery Medalist Lois Lowry.
Remembering Robie Harris
The day began with a tribute to Robie H. Harris, the creator behind the children’s book It’s Perfectly Normal, and many others, who died in January. Clinical psychologist Ben Harris, Candlewick Press editor Hilary Van Dusen, and authors Amy Hest, Susan Kuklin, Elizabeth Levy, and Lois Lowry took to the stage with moderator Fatima Shaik.
The panel opened with Levy, whose friendship with Harris began in early childhood as the pair lived in attached houses and went to the same schools in Buffalo, N.Y., and grew as they both went on to pursue careers in children’s literature.
“Our lives and our children’s lives and writing lives were totally intertwined,” Levy said. “Robie’s honesty and humor and fierceness for the ones she loved and for what she believed in persisted until the day she died.”
Harris, who said he is “proud to be Robie’s oldest child,” began by noting “she would have loved to see you all here. [It’s] really so profound, being surrounded by people who knew her and knew her work.”
Harris said his mother’s “superpower” was the ability her work had to help children feel safe in a world with so much to learn. “A child’s world is bursting at the seams, not with small feelings, but with big and complicated feelings,” which can be really scary and really isolating, he said. “And her books created a world that allowed kids to see these really big and complicated feelings and experiences and feel just a little less alone with them.”
On considering his mother’s legacy, Harris said, “This was her gift to kids, and it will continue to live and breathe well past her lifetime, and with some luck, will outlive this particularly insane moment in our lives.”
Throughout her career, Harris established a strong presence at Bank Street as a student and later in her teaching position at Bank Street School for Children. Panelists highlighted how important she was to the institution. Kuklin, who knew Harris for more than 50 years, and eventually formed a friend group nicknamed the “Gang of Four” consisting of Harris, Kuklin, Shaik, and Levy, noted how Harris’s absence could be felt.
“This is the first time I’ve ever been on a panel here at Bank Street where Robie wasn’t sitting front or center or next to me,” Kuklin said. “I may make a few mistakes, but I do have her in my ear.”
Hest, who shared how she fell in love with Harris’s work upon first read, acknowledged the serendipity of Bank Street, noting she “[met] Robie in person, right here, in this auditorium.”
Van Dusen spoke of her experience with Harris both professionally and personally, describing her as “kind and welcoming.” Watching Harris’s resilience as an author of sexual education guides, which were hotly debated and contested then and now, shaped Van Dusen’s perspective on the type of work she wanted to bring into the world.
“With Robie as a role model, I have strived to acquire and publish books that in small or maybe big ways, can make a child feel affirmed, give them a direction to try, or a role model to follow, or even lead them to ask important, life changing questions,” Van Dusen said.
The creators shared their stories of a lifetime of comradery and respect for the author, and Van Dusen closed with a sentiment that felt clear throughout this panel of remembrance and honor: “I miss her terribly.
Tweens in the Big Apple
Tween readership and local New York city culture was the focus of the “New York City Middle-Grade Authors We Love” panel, which was moderated by Shelley Diaz Vale, reviews director of School Library Journal. The conversation featured authors Carlos Hernandez, Emma Otheguy, Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich, and Karina Yan Glaser.
Capturing the magic of this beloved city on the page can be a challenge, and for Rhuday-Perkovich, writing about NYC meant showcasing its normalcy, not its glitz and glam.
“Kids I’ve worked with in the past used to always say, ‘We want to read stories about kids like us.’ Not about the stereotypes of New York City and of [city] kids and the negative things that people say,” Rhuday-Perkovich said. “Or even the things that people think are positive about like Broadway or entertainment. [I write about] regular kids living in the city and having different kinds of families and different experiences.”
For Hernandez, who writes in the Marvel universe, New York City made for an ideal setting because of the city’s multitudes. “The reason I think that Marvel sets so much of its universe in New York is because you can believe that superheroes would be here,” Hernandez said. “You can believe in the infinity that is New York, and that it is basically a multiverse unto itself. When I’m writing this fantasy, it’s much less fantastic than it would otherwise have to be because of its setting in New York.”
Otheguy wanted to highlight immigration and housing in her novel Sofía Acosta Makes a Scene, central issues to New York, through a character whose voice won’t be stifled. “[The protagonist] is making trouble. She’s making a scene,” Otheguy said. “What makes her complete her journey is when she realizes that even as a child of immigrants in New York, that she can boldly and joyfully make a scene and speak out about these issues she cares about. And to me, that is the story of New York.”
The authors were drawn to writing middle grade for different reasons. For Rhuday-Perkovich, growing up as a shy child, literature about big boisterous families offered a safe refuge, and she wanted to offer the same for young readers. “I want to write books about Black families that I know, and about the people that I know,” she said. “[And] all of the ways that we have these connections and these ties and give something to kids that books gave me to help me work through the difficult and the joyful times in life.”
Van Glaser said, “I fell in love with reading with middle grade books. I feel like when kids are at the middle grade age, that’s when they really start to explore ideas, and that's why I’m a little bit alarmed by what’s happening right now,” referring to the rise in book censorship across the nation.
Othegy expressed that part of the appeal of middle grade is it offers readers one of the earliest forms of agency and independence young people have. “I think that’s the transition that readers are making in middle grade. [It’s asking], ‘What is it about book culture that I am actually electing? What am I making a part of myself?’ I started reading fantasy as a middle grader, which nobody in my family reads, but it’s something that I like, and it’s all my own—and [that’s what makes] middle grade essential.”
A Booked and Busy Brooklyn Studio
The third panel of the day shined a light on a unique collaboration between illustrators who work together in a studio first built in Brooklyn as a factory in the 1920s near the Gowanus Canal.Sophie Blackall, Brian Floca, Johnny Marciano, Doug Salati, Dasha Tolstikova, and Rowboat Watkins, were invited to the stage by moderator Roxie Munro to discuss how their joint space has impacted their work and blossomed into a community.
The illustrators began by discussing how the pandemic impacted their presence in the studio, with some illustrators taking a break from the space while others held steadfast.
“There was nobody else in the building so it was quite empty, and it seemed like the safest place to be,” Watkins said.
“They had to come in because they had people at home, and I had to come in because I had no one at home,” Floca joked. “This could be very isolating work. I worked at home alone, and to have a community that just normalizes doing this for a living, that provides a space for these conversations—which if you work in an office you maybe take for granted—is incredibly valuable.
Being together in the studio offers the creators opportunities to get outside looks on their work. “These are some of the best bookmakers I know, and I feel unbelievably fortunate to share a space with them and to be able to pick their brains,” Blackall said. While working on her picture book Farmhouse, Blackall felt she was applying “Band-Aid endings for it. And Brian just cut to the heart of it and said, ‘You’ve got to make it true. It is true in every other respect.’ And he was right.”
Salati shared a similar sentiment about how the early days of working on his Caldecott-winning picture book Hot Dog came to be, “because there was nothing else happening.” When his “industrious peers” asked what project he was working on, it was his studiomates’ piqued interest that “initially kept that book moving.”
Sharing a space grants each of the creators opportunities to check in with one another, and offer encouragement through what can often be an isolating process. “It’s a great thing, to say, “How is this going for you?’ ” Salati said of his relationship with Watkins, who sits close to him in the studio. “It just helps you move forward. Maybe I’m speaking for myself, but when you’re making something new, it’s really exciting and a jolt of energy to have someone to [to have] a 10-minute conversation, and then you’re back on your way, and you feel like you can move forward.”
The conversation then shifted to the creative process and how community can help them keep perspective. “I think whether you’re working digitally or analog, the goal is to keep as much life in the pictures as you can,” Watkins said. “A book takes so long to make and it’s so hard not to lose the spark. The great thing about having people in the space is that when you’ve lost the ability to see your own work, you have 10 other eyes.”
As much as the studio is about work, there’s also plenty of play. The cohort has grown close over the years, with their families getting to know each other.
“My wife is a set designer in theater, and also a playwright, and Rowboat’s daughter has actually been in one of her productions,” Marciano said. “We’ve all been up to Milkwood a retreat for children’s book creators run by Blackall and her husband together. The socializing outside [of work] is literally like having an extended family. That’s as good as it gets.”
“I think one of the things that you have probably surmised from this conversation is that we are in each other’s space,” Blackall said in closing. “I feel like that is not only like a big part of why we’re such good friends, but it’s a big part of how we trust each other and share our work.”
Lois Lowry: Literature in the Lives of Children
Lois Lowry closed out the day with a keynote speech that highlighted how her family’s longstanding love of literature established her appreciation for reading, beginning a slideshow of her family with a portrait of her mother taken in about 1912, with ribbons in her hair and book in hand.
More images Lowry showcased include her with her sister, highlighting how present books were in the Lowry family. “These photographs were posed with books, because that’s what was valued in this family.”
“Often, when I get an email that asks, ‘How did you decide to become a writer?’ I begin by explaining that I was very fortunate to have grown up in a family that valued books,” Lowry said. “And you can see from [these photos] that that goes back several generations.”
Lowry’s grandfather, president of a Pennsylvania bank, and “a distinguished gray-haired man who always wore a three-piece suit with a vest” is at the core of one of Lowry’s cherished memories of reading. Upon hearing him read a line from William Cullen Bryant’s “Thanatopsis” while waiting for a train, Lowry was fascinated and wanted to know more. Her grandfather later read the poem to her over and over again, an experience she’d never forget.
“It’s a poem about death, but I didn't know that,” Lowry said. “I didn’t understand a thing about it, but I said, ‘Read it again.’ And he did. But more than that, I was listening to his voice, feeling his profound respect for the words, and hearing the cadence and the significance of them.”
Lowry ensured that the gift of loving reading early on would be passed on to her own children, going so far as writing and illustrating books for the “amusement of my kids and myself.” The audience was treated to a read-aloud of “The Hippo in the Hollyhocks,” a book Lowry had created for her children that followed a woman warning her husband of animals hiding in the shrubbery.
In preparation for her keynote, Lowry asked her children about the books that left an impact on their lives. As a child, her son Ben had once cared for a pet rabbit who got injured, and in its final moments he took it upstairs to lie in bed with it. His pick was E.B. White’s classic Charlotte’s Web and when asked why, he told her how the line, “No one was with her when she died” stayed with him all his life. “I’ve thought since then about that and the genius of E.B. White to write a line that would affect a child in that way.”
On how literature can offer children solace in difficult moments in life, Lowry said, “I think for everybody, there is a book like that, or could be or should be, and you are the ones who put those books into the hands of the children who need them.”
In closing, Lowry highlighted the interconnectedness of each generation of readers, and the importance of continuing to pass along a love of reading. “I had a mother who read to me. You are those mothers I am. You had those mothers I did. We are all so very lucky.”
