Dan Santat joins Joanna and Caroline to celebrate the launch of their book The Day the Books Disappeared! They share an honest conversation around the impacts of book banning, challenges within the publishing industry at large, and the need for art that continues to push back.

To snag swag and copies of The Day the Books Disappeared signed by both Joanna and Caroline, order from Linden Tree Books

To get swag and a signed, personalized copy by Caroline, order from Politics and Prose

Here are some highlights from our episode with the #1 NYTimes bestselling, National Book Award-winning, former National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature Jacqueline Woodson:

• Starting stories with questions
• Writing "quiet" books that speak loudly
• The wisdom of young people, especially before that wisdom is silenced
• Deconstructing “show don’t tell”
• How to write about complicated topics with honesty and hope
• Separating yourself as a writer from the character and the story
• The questions Jackie is wrestling with right now
• Some things that have (and haven’t) changed about publishing

Jacqueline Woodson is an American writer of books for adults, children, and adolescents. She is best known for her National Book Award-Winning memoir Brown Girl Dreaming, and her Newbery Honor-winning titles After Tupac and D Foster, Feathers, and Show Way. Her picture books The Day You Begin and The Year We Learned to Fly were NY Times Bestsellers. After serving as the Young People’s Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2017, she was named the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature by the Library of Congress for 2018–19. She was awarded the Hans Christian Andersen Medal in 2020. Later that same year, she was named a MacArthur Fellow.

Links from the episode:

• Mychal Threet’s “The Library Is for Everyone” shirt via Out of Print
• The Baldwin Fellowship Program
• Harbor Me by Jacqueline Woodson
• Before the Ever After by Jacqueline Woodson
• The Other Side by Jacqueline Woodson
• After Tupac and D Foster by Jacqueline Woodson

Highlights from our conversation with Founder and Publisher of Kokila, Namrata Tripathi:

• The power of celebrating not just our communal work, but also ourselves
• Voice as an essential point of view with no illusion of neutrality
• How cheap workarounds subvert the hard work of uncovering our own voice
• The power of words like “intuition” (despite how it may come off as fluffy or weak)
• Supporting writers in identifying who they are actually in conversation with on the page
• The lifelong work of knowing how to be more honest with ourselves and the world
• The priceless bit of publishing wisdom a former boss shared
• How Kokila’s intentional approach to each facet of publishing is intrinsically tied to the books they put out into the world.

Namrata Tripathi is Founder and Publisher of Kokila. Previously, Namrata held editorial positions at HarperCollins, Disney-Hyperion, and Simon and Schuster. She is the editor of New York Times bestsellers Hair Love by Matthew A. Cherry and Vashti Harrison and Antiracist Baby by Ibram X. Kendi and Ashley Lukashevsky; the Newbery Honor-winning middle grade novel The Night Diary by Veera Hiranandani; and the National Book Award Finalists Noggin by John Corey Whaley, Patron Saints of Nothing by Randy Ribay, and The Legend of Auntie Po by Shing Yin Khor. Namrata grew up in Afghanistan, India, Canada, Pakistan, Germany, and Poland, and has happily called New York City home for the last twenty-five years.

They’re back!!! Here are some highlights from Joanna and Caroline’s first episode after their five-month KLHH hiatus:

• Joanna’s major recent life events!
• Caroline’s crisis of faith around her Enneagram number
• Book launches and Big Book Energy
• Where Caroline and Joanna have been finding hope recently
• What’s next for Kidlit Happy Hour

Some links from today’s episode:

• Preorder BECOMING BOBA along with the Jilly Bing doll bundle
• This American Life episodes:
  • • #857 Museum of Now
    • #850 If You Want to Destroy My Sweater, Pull this Thread as I Walk Away
    • #859 Chaos Graph
    • #849 The Narrator

Here are some highlights from our conversation with the NYTimes bestselling, award-winning cartoonist and graphic novelist Raina Telgemeier:

• Why hearing her teacher's name was the first time Raina ever considered "voice"
• One gripe with Judy Blume
• How her voice has (or hasn’t) changed since middle school
• Power and difficulty of putting yourself back in headspace of child self
• Forming three dimensional pictures from memories
• Why emotional arcs matters more than details
• Sneak peek behind the scenes of her next graphic novel: The Cartoonist Club

Raina Telgemeier is the #1 New York Times bestselling, multiple Eisner Award–winning creator of Smile, Sisters, and Guts, which are all graphic memoirs based on her childhood. She is also the creator of Drama and Ghosts, the adapter and illustrator of the first four Baby-sitters Club graphic novels, and, with Scott McCloud, the co-creator of The Cartoonists Club. Facing Feelings: Inside the World of Raina Telgemeier is based on an exhibition that was held at The Ohio State University’s Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, and will be published in October 2025. Raina lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Our conversation with Aida Salazar is here! Aida shares about how one workshop radically changed her approach to voice, why writing is a spiritual practice, how she stays open to receiving stories from our ancestors, and so much more.

Aida Salazar is an award-winning author, arts activist, and translator whose writings explore issues of identity and social justice. Her critically acclaimed verse novels and picture books have received numerous awards including: a Caldecott Honor, the Malka Penn Award, the Américas Award, Tomás Rivera Book Award, International Latino Book Awards, California Library Association Beatty Award, Northern CA Book Award, Jane Addams Peace Honor, an NCTE Charlotte Huck Honor among other distinctions. She lives with her family of artists in Oakland, CA.

Here are some highlights from our conversation with NYTimes-bestselling, award-winning author Jasmine Warga!:

• Excavating not simply WHAT your characters want, but WHY they want it
• The necessity of internal contractions
• Becoming a collector of ideas and moments throughout the drafting and revision process
• How images drive her plotting process
• The role of alchemy in storytelling
• The consistent theme at the root of her stories, and writing for our inner 10-year-olds
• The art of crafting the twist

Jasmine Warga is the #1 New York Times-bestselling author of middle grade novels Other Words For Home, The Shape of Thunder, A Strange Thing Happened in Cherry Hall and A Rover’s Story. Other Words For Home earned multiple awards, including a John Newbery Honor, a Walter Honor for Young Readers, and a Charlotte Huck Honor. The Shape of Thunder was a School Library Journal and Bank Street best book of the year, a finalist for the Barnes & Noble Children's and YA Book Award, and has been named to several state award reading lists. A Rover’s Story, her latest novel, was an instant New York Times bestseller, a Indie Next List and a Junior Library Guild selection, and was named a best book of the year by Publishers Weekly and The Washington Post. She is also the author of young adult novel, My Heart and Other Black Holes, which has been translated into over twenty different languages. Originally from Cincinnati, she now lives in the Chicago-area with her family in a house filled with books.

Here are a few highlights from our conversation with the award-winning Adib Khorram:

• How his notes app has come to be bursting with character ideas and peoples' idiosyncrasies
• Impact of theater school on character-building
• Operating as a subconsciously-driven artist
• How his starting place for creating character differs from other authors
• Prioritization of character vs plot vs world building
• Revision as the time to sharpen or dull edges of character
• Why you may want to think twice before eating a D.C. taco from a gas station

ADIB KHORRAM is the author of DARIUS THE GREAT IS NOT OKAY, which earned the William C. Morris Debut Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Young Adult Literature, and a Boston Globe–Horn Book Honor, as well as a multitude of other honors and accolades. His followup, DARIUS THE GREAT DESERVES BETTER, received three starred reviews, was an Indie Bestseller, and received a Stonewall Honor. His latest novel, KISS & TELL, received four starred reviews. His debut picture book, SEVEN SPECIAL SOMETHINGS: A NOWRUZ STORY was released in 2021. He lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where people don’t usually talk about themselves in the third person.

LINKS:

Website: www.adibkhorram.com

IG: Adib Khorram

First listen to Adib's overshare, then watch him white-knuckle (and crush) his speech at the FYE Conference in 2020