More Fall Conference News

Gayle Brown, art director, at Eerdmans Books for Young Readers, walked writers and illustrators through the publishing process: from a manuscript’s arrival on the editor’s desk through to publication. Brown was among speakers at Writing and Illustrating for Kids (WIK), which  is put on each year in Birmingham by the Southern Breeze region of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI). Brown showed examples of “in-process” drawings by illustrators, including one book dummy that had little more than line drawings. “If we hadn’t worked with this illustrator before or knew her work, this would have made me very worried.”The sparsely illustrated dummy had tons of purple sticky notes attached to it; I don’t know if those were the illustrator’s notes to Gayle or Gayle’s notes to the illustrator.
Some of the books she showed us were: A River of Words: The Story of William Carlos Williams, a Caldecott Honor Book, by Jen Bryant and illustrated by Melissa Sweet; The Lord’s Prayer with illustrations by Tim Ladwig. She told us to look for a book that will be out this spring called Beatitudes by Carole  Boston Weatherford and illustrated by Ladwig.

That’s all for today. More conference news tomorrow.

Wolfsnail update:

My friend Julie’s children found a wolfsnail near their Jackson home over the weekend. You can read about it here.