On November 21, Women’s Media Group hosted “Celebrating the Women and Art of Children’s Books” at the Society of Illustrators in Manhattan. The society’s annual Original Art showcase—an exhibit of the year’s best picture book art—provided the backdrop for a discussion with illustrators Selina Alko, Vashti Harrison, and Cecilia Ruiz. The panel was moderated by Carolina Schwarz, founder of We the Content, a consulting agency that helps children’s publishers to position and sell their books in the U.S.
Jennifer Perry and Jodi Brockington, co-presidents of WMG, began by giving some background on the organization, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. All proceeds from the event went toward the WMG’s scholarship program for young women pursuing careers in media. Perry said, “We want to recognize the joy that children’s books bring for all ages. It’s all about freedom of expression, inclusion, imagination, and empowerment.”
Author, illustrator, and designer Ruiz kicked off the presentation portion of the evening with a slideshow tracing how her book Mr. Fiorello’s Head (Enchanted Lion, 2023) came to be. The story began with a visit to the doctor when her husband was concerned about a new growth. Thankfully, it turned out to be a benign deposit, a lipoma. “We thought the name was quite charming!” she said. Anxiety gave way to relief and even delight, as she and her husband, a fellow artist, started exchanging doodles of a lumpy figure named “Mr. Lipoma.” Ruiz fell in love with the character, a bald man with three unruly little hairs, perhaps because he felt familiar. “I thought of my father, who had a similar hairline,” she said, and landed on an idea for a book about a man losing his hair. She was interested in the larger theme: “Things in life don’t go our way. We constantly need to adapt.”
But Ruiz’s agent was skeptical, saying, “There’s no hope in that story.” So, it was back to the drawing board. She experimented with adding interactive elements, such as flaps. But it was still a no from her agent. “I really don’t feel for your character,” he said. Ruiz became aware of a paradox: “Closeness [to a character] doesn’t always give us intimacy.” She decided to zoom out, to give her story a sense of context and place. She drew a scene of Mr. Lipoma before he started balding. He’s sitting on the edge of the bathtub drying his hair with great pride. Showing the reader how he cares for his hair, she said, makes us feel for him when he loses it. Ruiz pulled back further, showing Mr. Lipoma leaving his house. A detail of a tree with just three leaves remaining mirrors his three little hairs, which eventually fall out. Rather than focus on the loss, she chose to have her protagonist plant three seeds that grow into sunflowers. Finally, with a nudge from the marketing team, she renamed Mr. Lipoma something less clinical. “Fiorello” means little flower: an emblem of hope and regrowth, to match his final act of planting seeds.
Next, Alko took the stage to speak about the process behind her illustrations for the historical picture book Stars of the Night: The Courageous Children of the Czech Kindertransport, written by Caren Stelson (Carolrhoda, 2023). The book—which earned a silver medal from the Society of Illustrators—relates the journey of the 669 children from Czechoslovakia who were rescued on the eve of World War II. December 2 marked the anniversary of the arrival of the first Kindertransport in England in 1938. Alko, who was raised by a Turkish Jewish father and Ashkenazi mother in Vancouver, said “the story resonated” deeply. Illustrating during the pandemic made the emotions even more acute. “Everything felt really hard and painful,” she said. “My own children were going through different types of suffering, and so I was identifying with the characters. As I got further and further into making the book, it became this metaphor for separation anxiety and saying goodbye to your kid.”
While Nicky & Vera by Peter Sís focuses more on the role of Nicholas Winton in the rescue operation and on survivor Vera Gissing, Stelson and Alko tell the story from the children’s point of view. Alko said, “I had to figure out how to illustrate a collective group.” She selected five colors—orange, red, green, light blue, and dark blue—to emphasize five of the children. And she made the decision not to show the faces of any of the Nazis. The five colors are picked up again at the end of the book in the form of “dots that show the generations to come."
Alko concluded on a hopeful note, saying, “There are a lot of people who survived [because of the] Kindertransport, who went on to have extremely rich and successful lives, including Dr. Ruth, and a bunch of Nobel Prize-winning scientists.” She shared a clip from a 1988 episode of the BBC program That’s Life, in which a surprised and tearful Nicholas Winton discovered he was surrounded by some of the children he had rescued from the Holocaust. An estimated 6,000 descendants owe their lives to Winton: a small drop of hope among the six million Jewish people who were annihilated.
Capping off the presentations, Harrison spoke about her picture book Big, (Little, Brown) for which she won the 2024 Caldecott Medal, a Coretta Scott King Author Honor, and a Coretta Scott King Illustrator Honor. Speaking of her personal impetus for the book, she said, “Much of the creative process for me is about expressing things through artwork that I don’t necessarily have the words for.” Big tells the story of a growing girl’s “journey toward self-love,” as adults go from praising her for being a “big girl” to putting her down for her size—a symptom of adultification and anti-fat bias, Harrison explained. “This book was inspired by a number of things, including my relationship to my body and Black girls as a whole, but also the words that we use with one another.” Above all, “I wanted to reclaim this word big for her,” she said. Harrison showed how she integrated words in the illustrations, experimenting with hand-lettering and the way text and images fit on the page.
Like Alko, Harrison’s use of color is deliberate and symbolic. “I chose pink specifically to be the color to represent the girl, because she’s still growing and she’s still changing,” she said. Most of the story is tinged with a pale pink. “Glimpses of a very bright pink” appear when she is dancing and growing. “To me, that represents her future and her potential,” Harrison said. But when the girl is sad, the pink palette disappears. It returns at the story’s end, when she learns to “make more space for herself.” Harrison discussed “the psychology behind the color” and how “pink is associated with gentleness, love, tenderness, and nurturing. Pink flowers symbolize innocence, joy, playfulness, and happiness, and these are all things that this girl deserves.” Harrison affirmed, “Her body is not a problem that needs fixing, and neither did mine.”
Moderating a q&a with the artists, Schwarz highlighted the commonalities in their books. “These three stories take the reader through a journey of growth,” she said. “They all left me with a profound sense of hope.”
When asked about the mature point of view of the man in Mr. Fiorello’s Head—an unconventional choice for a picture book—Ruiz said she hoped the story was relatable on a universal level. “I tried to make a book about dealing with change, because change is inevitable; it’s always coming. And I think that is applicable to everyone—child and adult.”
On the challenge of presenting a horrific moment in history to young readers in Stars of the Night, Alko said, “I did a lot of work in my sketchbook to think of symbols and connections. What I try to do is come up with child-friendly metaphors that [the reader] can connect to.” The visual motif of the stars and the sun is inspired by a line from survivor Vera Gissing’s memoir, in which she recalled the parting words of her parents at the train station: “ ‘We love you. We love you. Remember the stars and the sun,’ ” they said, encouraging her to think of them whenever she looked at the sky. “So the kids had some hope to carry with them when they made the journey overseas,” Alko said.
Schwarz asked Harrison how the concept evolved for the book’s jacket and case cover design. The jacket shows the girl struggling to hold up the word big, as if she is being overwhelmed by the label. “This is where the story begins,” Harrison said. But the word’s connotations shift throughout the story. “By the end, and under the case cover, we see that big is just one of the many words that are associated with her.” Harrison showed the hand-lettered “words of affirmation” that appear under the jacket, such as good, kind, brave, bold, and graceful. “I want kids to feel empowered to decide for themselves who they’re going to be,” she said. “I want them to know that they can choose from any of these words. So on the cover, big is a burden, but by the end, it’s just one of the many words that describe her.”
