‟Books transmit values. They explore our common humanity. What is the message when some children are not represented in those books?”
—WALTER DEAN MYERS

Where Are the People of Color in Children's Books?
New York Times, March 15, 2014

#KWELI24
PROGRAM SCHEDULE

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Pre-Conference Events

ULTRAVIOLET by Aida Salazar
Thursday, April 18th (7:00 - 8:30pm) at the Schomburg Center

See highlights from our #Kweli24 Pre-conference events at Ballet Hispanico below!

REMEMBER US by Jacqueline Woodson & ALL YOU HAVE TO DO by Autumn Allen

YOU’RE BREAKING MY HEART by Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich

Friday, April 19, 2024

9:00am - 10:00am

SPECIAL EVENT
DR. SONJA CHERRY-PAUL in conversation with ATINUKE, author of Too Small Tola series and L is For Love

10:15am - 1:15pm

A. Picture Book
Finding The Heart in Picture Book Making with COZBI A. CABRERA, illustrator of Chef Edna: Queen of Southern Cooking, Edna Lewis and author/illustrator of Me & Mama

What if you want to write and/or illustrate a picture book and have no idea where to start? This masterclass will fire up your creative instincts and natural gift of storytelling in words and pictures, whether you are an experienced or aspiring picture book creator – working on a project, in between projects or trying to choose your next project. Get to the heart of your story and stir the heart of your reader who’ll want to return to the world you’ve created, again and again!

B. Middle Grade & Young Adult Novel
Writing Home with IBI ZOBOI, author of American Street and Nigeria Jones

How do we make a setting, home, city, and country feel like the main character in our stories? We will explore what it means to write home--grounding our stories in our communities' smells, sounds, and colors to bring them to life and make them breathing and speaking characters while infusing cultural and political dynamics that shape how we view our homes.

C. Novel in Verse
Touching The Heart: Revising the Verse Novel with AIDA SALAZAR, author of Ultraviolet and Jovita Wore Pants: The Story of A Mexican Freedom Fighter

This session will teach writers how to sharpen their poetic craft and storytelling when revising any first draft(s) of a verse novel. Using a poet's toolbox such as artful word choice, lyricism, rhythm and form, theme and metaphor, image systems, etc., in tandem with the use of innovative story structure such as plot, voice, character arcs, etc., writers will learn how to trim down, expand, or shape a story true to their hearts. The strategies taught will take their story from messy first draft to a unique story that sings with poetry, emotion, and light.

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1:15pm - 1:45pm
LUNCH

1:45pm - 2:45pm
The Use of Flowers: The Environmental Poetics of Lucille Clifton with DR. JOSHUA BENNETT, author of The World is Full of Beautiful Quiet Things and Spoken Word: A Cultural History

The Use of Flowers is an attempt to use the pit school—a term for spaces that enslaved people dug into the ground to teach one another under the cover of nightfall—as a lens through which to construct a robust genealogy of African American writers devoted to the transmission of what I have elsewhere termed black ecological consciousness. For these authors, black study is not an activity limited to the bounds of formal institutions in any traditional sense. Rather it is rooted, at its very best, in a commitment to care for the Earth. It requires that we go outside, read the skies, and listen to the wisdom of what does not communicate in human speech, but calls out to us in a song as old as the land we share.

This talk will focus on the environmental poetics of Lucille Clifton. Through an engagement with her life and letters—especially her poetry and works of children’s literature—I argue that what often appears to be apocalypticism in her work is also a kind of Afrofuturism, a willingness to take seriously the idea that any apocalypse is also, quite literally, a revelation or opening: one wherein black human beings can improvise a radically divergent way of sharing the planet. Indeed, Clifton’s capacious environmental imagination, I will argue, helps lay the groundwork for a more expansive conception of black study as a form of species thinking, a planetary poetics for the 21st century and beyond.

3:00pm - 6:00pm

D. Poetry | Novel in Verse
Be/Longing with SAFIA ELHILLO, author of Bright Red Fruit and Girls That Never Die: Poems

This is a generative writing workshop where we’ll read some example poems looking at community through different lenses, with little micro-prompts in between to start building out a page of notes, culminating in a prompt for participants to write a poem about their own communities and feelings of belonging.

E. Picture Book
Picture and Word with AYA GHANAMEH, author/illustrator of These Olive Trees, illustrator of Dear Muslim Child by Rahma Rodaah, and designer of children’s books at Penguin Random House

This class will cover the core elements of creating captivating picture books that engage and inspire young readers. From generating compelling narratives to bringing words to life through pictures, we’ll explore the intricacies of the creative process from ideation to publication. This class will assert the importance of children’s literature as a cradle for radical acts of imagination, acts required to realize our collective liberation. We will foster a greater appreciation of picture books and the worlds they contain.

F. Speculative Fiction
To Disturb and Delight: Building The Speculative World with ANDREA L. ROGERS, author of The Art Thieves and Man Made Monsters

Building worlds—for better or worse: the possibility and pitfalls for worldbuilding in speculative fiction. What are the consequences and dangers of writing new and old worlds? How do we create worlds with hope when the world is on fire? If this… then what…?

Saturday, April 20, 2024

8:15am - 8:25am

WELCOME by Laura Pegram

Adaptation of A Crown of Stories: The Life and Language of Beloved Writer Toni Morrison: Dance performance

8:30am - 9:00am

KEYNOTE by Autumn Allen

9:15am - 10:15am

A. Publishing, Community, & Culture Track
Collaborations | Editor & Debut Author
In an early interview, Toni Morrison defined what makes a good editor. “Knowing what not to touch; asking all the questions you probably would have asked yourself had there been the time. Good editors are really the third eye.” Editor Irene Vázquez was “the third eye” for Anna Lapera during the 2o22 Kweli Sing the Truth! Mentorship Program. Before the end of the mentorship year, they had offered Lapera a book deal for MANI SEMILLA FINDS HER QUETZAL VOICE. “Kweli has a special place in my heart since it brought me and Anna together,” said Vázquez. During this breakout session, the audience will review some of the edit letters and feedback they shared, see how Vázquez and Lapera work collaboratively and listen to a discussion on choosing an editor.
Featuring: Irene Vázquez and Anna Lapera

B. Novels / Memoir Track (YA & MG)
ON CRAFT (Intermediate Level)
Black and Native Speculative YA
“I saw Emmett Till this week at the grocery store” is a speculative poem from Eve L. Ewing's second collection, 1919. Ewing stated that the poem was inspired by a lot of things, one of which is a line in a poem by her friend Fatimah Asghar: “I wish them only a mundane life.” Ewing’s poem imagines an alternate reality where Emmett Till gets to grow old and the speaker runs into him at the grocery store. “The poem is also very much part of the Afrofuturist strand of my work,” said Ewing. “A lot of my work is around reimagining time and space and kind of fuzzifying the boundaries between time and space as we usually understand them.” Join us in this breakout session as two award winning authors, Olugbemisola Rhuday Perkovich and Andrea L. Rogers, chat with their editor Nick Thomas about how they actually fuzzified the boundaries between time and space in their new and forthcoming speculative young adult novels: YOU'RE BREAKING MY HEART and THE ART THIEVES.
Featuring: Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich & Andrea L. Rogers; moderated by Nick Thomas

C. Illustrated Books/Nonfiction Track
ON CRAFT (Intermediate Level)
From the Archives
Aya Ghanameh (author illustrator of THESE OLIVE TREES), Traci Huahn (author of MAMIE TAPE FIGHTS TO GO TO SCHOOL) and Traci N. Todd (author of MAKE A PRETTY SOUND: A STORY OF ELLA JENKINS) each used archival resources to help them shape the powerful art and text in their beautiful picture books. THESE OLIVE TREES “is inspired by the experiences of [Aya’s Palestinian] family who cultivated her love of the land throughout her upbringing in exile.” MAMIE TAPE FIGHTS TO GO TO SCHOOL “follows an 8-year-old Chinese American changemaker who fought for the right to go to school in San Francisco in the 1880s.” MAKE A PRETTY SOUND “tells Ella's story from the time she was a young child, first learning about music through her Uncle Flood playing harmonica, to her encounters with racial discrimination, and finally her involvement with the folk music movement and her discovery that music could be a powerful tool to teach children and bridge cultures.” Watch rare archival film footage and read excerpts from articles that informed their process.
Featuring: Aya Ghanameh, Traci Huahn and Traci N. Todd; moderated by Cozbi A. Cabrera

10:30am - 11:30am

A. Publishing, Community, & Culture Track
Afrofuturism: Turning to the Sea

Toni Morrison said “[a]ll water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place. It is emotional memory—what the nerves and the skin remember as well as how it appeared. And a rush of imagination is our ‘flooding.’ ”

Morrison’s novel Beloved is dedicated to “Sixty Million and more” Africans who were enslaved. We’ll open this breakout session with a few images from The Middle Passage by Tom Feelings, which “bear witness to the sufferings of an entire people” and talk about Drexciya, Yemaya and rituals of healing and intention with two children’s book authors who wrote about Mama Ocean and the African diaspora in Yaya and the Sea and The River is My Ocean for Denene Millner Books. Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988 and The Middle Passage won the 1996 Coretta Scott King Award.
Featuring: Rio Cortez and Karen Good Marable; moderated by Denene Millner

B. Novels / Memoir Track (YA & MG)
ON CRAFT
MG & YA| The Plot Thickens
Whether you are a pantser or a plotter, you still need to advance your story through a series of events that challenge your characters and demonstrate growth. In this session, panelists discuss how they developed a compelling plot, step by step, and how they decided which parts of their plot to save, change or eliminate altogether during the revision process.
Featuring: Amina Luqman-Dawson Patricia Park, and Shannon C. F. Rogers; moderated by Arely Guzmán

C. Illustrated Books/Nonfiction Track
ON CRAFT
That is How Love Sounds | Picture Book Biography
Carole Boston Weatherford’s new picture book biography on Toni Morrison (A CROWN OF STORIES: THE LIFE AND LANGUAGE OF BELOVED WRITER TONI MORRISON) begins with the question “How do you tell a story?” That question is answered for any writer who is listening deeply to Toni Morrison, to their surroundings and to their own mind. A CROWN OF STORIES will be used as a springboard to a discussion on Toni Morrison and craft. Join us as we listen to what memory, character, language and history can teach us about telling a story.
Featuring: Carole Boston Weatherford in Conversation with Dr. Sonja Cherry-Paul

11:30am - 12:00pm
LUNCH

12:00pm - 12:45pm

KEYNOTE CONVERSATION with Safia Elhillo

12:50pm - 1:50pm

A. Publishing, Community, & Culture Track
“Free People Read Freely” | Fighting Book Bans
Tracie D. Hall was the first African American woman to lead the American Library Association since its inception in 1876. Her fierce declaration, “Free people read freely,” echoes still as we learn that “the number of titles targeted for censorship surged 65% in 2023 compared to 2022, reaching the highest levels ever documented by the American Library Association.” An examination of banned books lists reveals a troublesome pattern -- the censoring of books about race, racism, gender, and sexuality that challenge dominant narratives. Young readers around the country who are often left out of the conversation on censorship despite being impacted the most, are forming banned book clubs and anti-censorship groups. RuPaul recently co-founded a new online bookstore and will send a rainbow school bus across the country to give away books targeted by bans. Let’s talk about fighting book bans and get strategic.
Featuring: Seema Yasmin and Gwendolyn Maya Wallace; moderated by Hannah Moushabeck

B. Novels / Memoir Track (YA & MG)
ON CRAFT
MG & YA | Go Ahead. Make A Scene (Screenwriting Tips for Fiction)
Brit Bennett is a New York Times bestselling author who was asked to try her hand at adapting one of her novels for the screen. “The way I always thought about story (in novel writing)—sort of prioritizing language over image—well, . . . this was kind of inverted in screenwriting,” said Bennett. “The thing that I thought was challenging . . . was the idea of being efficient in a scene. Because in a movie, a scene has to do five things. You need to establish five things about the characters, where you are in the story, etc. It is useful to screenwriting for the sake of time and money. But I think it is also useful in the world of fiction.” In this breakout session, we’re going to spend time with three authors with a background in film studies who will make a scene, in public.
Featuring: Camara Aaron, Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich and Brian Young; moderated by Irene Vázquez

C. Illustrated Books/Nonfiction Track
ON CRAFT
Write Like a Painter
“I remember telling the artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith once that she paints like a writer and I write like a painter,” said U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo. The authors in this session will talk about painting words. We'll look at the significant details they added to their carefully crafted picture books, each one providing the reader with a beautiful constellation of people, objects and animals.
Featuring: Antwan Eady, Rio Cortez, Dr. Stacey Patton, and Andrea L. Rogers; moderated by Cheryl Klein

2:00pm - 3:00pm

A. Publishing, Community, & Culture Track
”Walk Straight” | Resisting Silence and Self-Censorship
In "Walk Straight," from CREATE DANGEROUSLY: THE IMMIGRANT ARTIST AT WORK, Edwidge Danticat touches on writers, like her, who risk criticism from the community when they "zigzag through the difficult roads," instead of walking in a straight line. These writers resist silence and self-censorship in timely works of art about empowerment, identity and social justice, knowing the importance of speaking truth to power.
Featuring: Frederick Joseph, Rhonda Roumani and Ibi Zoboi; moderated by Autumn Allen

B. Novels / Memoir Track (YA & MG)
Collaborations | Agent & Mid Career Author
From providing thoughtful feedback on drafts, to serving as a steady presence on important phone calls, to sending encouraging GIFS over text message, the role of the literary agent in guiding a writer's career is certainly wide ranging. For the collaboration between writer and agent to be successful, the writer must also be active and proactive, and learn to show up beyond the page. Join literary agent, Serene Hakim (Ayesha Pande Literary) for an insightful conversation with her client Shannon C.F. Rogers. Her debut novel, I'D RATHER BURN THAN BLOOM, received the 2024 APALA Asian/Pacific American Award for Young Adult Literature.
Featuring: Serene Hakim and Shannon C. F. Rogers

C. Illustrated Books/Nonfiction Track
ON CRAFT
Seeing Something Truthful | Tips from Author / Illustrators
Shaun Tan is a brilliant multi-hyphenate. He won an Oscar for his short animated film adaptation of THE LOST THING, and captured the displacement and awe with which immigrants respond to their new surroundings in his wordless graphic novel THE ARRIVAL. “[T]he central dilemma of any art making,” said Tan “is trying to represent something truthful about real, everyday experience in the world.” In this breakout session, three artists will discuss how they specifically bring the truth to the page in myriad ways. Emerging writers and illustrators will leave with at least six takeaways from this session.

Featuring: Aya Ghanameh, Niña Mata, and Daniel J. O’Brien; moderated by R. Gregory Christie

3:15pm - 4:15pm

FIRESIDE CHAT with Maysoon Zayid and Hannah Moushabeck

4:30pm - 5:00pm

KEYNOTE with Amina Luqman-Dawson

5:00pm - 6:00pm

CLOSING KEYNOTE CONVERSATION with Jason Reynolds and Cozbi A. Cabrera

6:00pm - 7:00pm

Author Signing

Sunday, April 21, 2024

9:15 am - 9:30am

Welcome with Laura Pegram

9:30am - 10:30am

SAUDADE: OUR LONGING FOR BRAZIL
Brazilian author Ana Crespo and illustrator André Ceolin will discuss the development—from inspiration to physical copy—of their new book, SAUDADE: OUR LONGING FOR BRAZIL, to be published by Neal Porter Books in June 2024. The book follows a Brazilian immigrant mother and her Brazilian American daughter on a hike as they discuss the meaning of the word Saudade and everything they feel Saudade of.

Ana and André will address the challenges of the book and how such challenges were overcome. Focusing on the text, Ana will touch on the problem statement and the character arc, especially in the context of a “quiet” book. André will explore the creative process behind illustrating images that relate to the narrative and evoke the feeling of Saudade.
Featuring: Ana Crespo and André Ceolin; moderated by Ariel Vanece

10:45am - 11:45am

A. Publishing, Community, & Culture Track
COLLABORATORS ON MOTHER NATURE, THE GRAPHIC NOVEL
Navajo author and filmmaker, Brian L. Young, was invited to serve as sensitivity reader and cultural consultant for the debut graphic novel MOTHER NATURE by horror icon and Oscar winner Jamie Lee Curtis, which she wrote with Russell Goldman and Karl Stevens. “This is the first time that I've seen the Navajo culture portrayed in a respectful way,” Young says. He says the eco-horror story also shows “that we have the power to reverse the dangers that climate change enacts on all our communities,” says Young. The three collaborators will talk about incorporating traditional Diné folklore into the graphic novel and film script AND MORE.
Featuring: Brian L. Young, Russell Goldman and Karl Stevens; moderated by Dr. Sonja Cherry-Paul

B. Craft Track (YA & MG)
Voice and Audience: First Pages
Writers often struggle with questions of voice and audience. Editors have found that, a PB manuscript, for example, might actually be more fitting for a MG audience and if the author did X, Y and Z, they would be well on their way. In this session, we will share excerpts from writers in the Kweli audience and three editors will weigh in with an X, Y and Z level of specificity.
Featuring: Traci N. Todd, Irene Vázquez and Phoebe Yeh; moderated by Arely Guzmán

C. Illustrated Track (PB & GN)
Behind the Scenes | Art and Design
Join us for an insightful talk on the art and design of two new picture books: DEAR MUSLIM CHILD by Rahma Roodah, with illustrations by Aya Ghanameh and BEING HOME by Traci Sorell, with illustrations by Michaela Goade. We'll examine peritext and design elements, as well as the words and paintings that make both books a work of collaborative art.
Featuring: Aya Ghanameh, Rahma Rodaah and Jasmin Rubero; moderated by Ariel Vanece

12:00pm - 1:00pm

A. Publishing, Community, & Culture Track
Marketing: What I Wish I Knew Before My Debut
Authors discuss all the things they wish they knew before their debut, from how to manage your expectations and plan a book tour, to how to monetize your content with public speaking and practice self-care as a ritual even when simultaneous deadlines are looming.
Featuring: Jyoti Rajan Gopal, Meghana Narayan and Gwendolyn Maya Wallace; moderated by Sheetal Sheth

B. Craft Track Track (YA & MG)
SFF & Magical Realism | Worldbuilding in Real and Surreal Landscapes
Using film clips from Pan’s Labyrinth directed by Guillermo del Toro and Beasts of the Southern Wild directed by Benh Zeitlin as a springboard, the panelists will lead a discussion on worldbuilding in real and surreal landscapes.
Featuring: Serene Hakim in Conversation with Alexandra V. Méndez

C. Illustrated Track (PB & GN)
Deep Into the Research
Cozbi A. Cabrera was awarded a Beinecke Library Fellowship at Yale University in 2022 - 2023 and spent four (4) months researching their archives. In this session, new and emerging writers and illustrators will come to understand the value of going “deep into the research;” how a single research project can sometimes lead to multiple books AND MORE. R. Gregory Christie recently completed a 45 foot mural on climate justice for the new Climate Museum in Soho, NYC. Daniel J. O’Brien recently completed a picture book biography about Los Angeles Dodger Glenn Burke, the first professional baseball player to come out as gay, and the story of how he created the high five.
Featuring: R. Gregory Christie and Daniel J. O'Brien; moderated by Cozbi A. Cabrera