My town was predominantly white, and as a Korean American, I’d always felt like an outsider. I think she was the first adult to ever respond to anything I’d written in such a positive way. She was fair but firm, and didn’t hand out praise gratuitously. Miss Walsh was my eleventh-grade English teacher. Tell us a bit about how that moment lit up the writer in you and the journey between that and the first book. You speak about how one day at school you were asked to invent your own similes and metaphors and you wrote ‘Mondays are like stepping on a slug,’ which, to your surprise, your teacher loved.
Achieving all these things within 32 pages is difficult, but I enjoy the challenge of distilling and paring down until every word is necessary. If it also happens to have funny moments, then even better, since kids (and adults) love to laugh, and kids will read a book multiple times if it’s funny. In my opinion, a good picture book engages the young reader through its story, characters, and illustrations, and ideally, has a subtext that kids can think about. What, in your experience, makes a good picture book? It’s not very many words and all you need is someone to draw good pictures. Writing a children’s book seems deceptively easy.
I spoke to Kang about the process of bringing a picture book to life, her eleventh grade literary awakening and working with her hubby. The wife and husband team have also received numerous other awards and mentions for their other work. You Are (Not) Small has won several awards, including the 2015 Theodor Seuss Geisel Award, and was listed as one of the NPR Best Books of 2014. She has, since then, published seven more books, all illustrated by her husband, Christopher Weyant. Anna Kang’s debut picture book, You Are (Not) Small, was published in 2014.
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