Maria Russo

Vashti Harrison is the writer and illustrator behind bestselling children’s books such as “Little Leaders: Bold Women in Black History.” The picture book she made with the Oscar-winning actress Lupita Nyong’o, “Sulwe,” is out this week, telling the story of a little girl who learns to love her “skin the color of midnight.” Earlier this year, Harrison worked with writer and filmmaker Matthew A. Cherry on “Hair Love,” a picture book that grew out of a short film about an African American girl whose father does her hair while her mother is in the hospital.

Harrison, 31, invited us to her studio in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood to talk about her creative process, blending traditional and digital media, and how she pushes against stereotypes in her work. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Q: What made you choose this space?

A: I moved into this apartment specifically so that I could have a large, light-filled space. I work digitally, and light isn’t actually the best thing for that! But it’s good for my well-being.

Q: How long have you been living and working here?

A: I moved to this apartment in May of 2017, but I’ve been in New York since 2016. When I first got here from Virginia, where I grew up and went to college, it was sort of a temporary period to see if I liked being in New York. And I did, so I looked for an apartment I could really settle down in, since I have to be in here all day long when I’m working. This is the first time I’ve had a dedicated space just for art.

Q: The room you work in looks so bright and lovely.

A: I was attracted to that room right away because the window was so interesting. I thought, “Look at all those neighbors.” I remembered watching the movie “Rear Window” and being struck by the scenes of Grace Kelly on a daybed in front of a window, looking out. So I got this daybed.

When I was working on “Sulwe,” I did have to put up light-blocking curtains to make sure I was getting all the colors correct. But often I do a lot of emails and busywork during the day and then I get into the drawing late at night, so it ends up working out.

There’s not one part of me that wanted to live in a dark little box. The work of an illustrator can be so isolating. To me it feels friendly and happy in here.

Q: You also keep a lot of brushes and pencils around. How often do you use them?

A: I call that my traditional media corner. I do work with paints and pencils all the time, but I don’t think anybody has seen it in my published work. I haven’t had the opportunity yet to incorporate it. I do tend to be faster digitally. I’m working on a book now and trying to figure out ways to blend traditional media into my digital work. But I work on stuff all the time that nobody gets to see.

Q: What are those little painted figures?

A: I picked up peg dolls from the dollar store and painted on them. I was going for something in between Japanese kokeshi dolls and Euro-American peg dolls. I give them as gifts.

Q: How did you choose which children’s books to keep on your shelves? Not all of them are picture books.

A: I do have a lot of middle-grade-ish books. But all of my books that I would really consider my own childhood favorites are still at my parents’ house. My Harry Potter books, for example. These books here are ones I picked up recently. I would very much like to do a middle-grade book, to both write and illustrate it, so I’m trying to absorb all the exciting books, the popular ones. I want to do a highly illustrated middle-grade fantasy novel about a child of color.

Q: Your last two books have been collaborations — “Sulwe” with Lupita Nyong’o and “Hair Love” with Matthew A. Cherry. How did that go after you had so much success with the solo effort of the “Little Leaders” books?

A: For “Sulwe,” I was trying to channel Lupita as a child. She is from the Luo people of Kenya, so I studied their dress and costume. For “Hair Love,” I originally designed the characters just for the short film that Matthew Cherry made. Then they signed a deal for the book. For the dad, I was thinking about a gentle giant type, and later on I decided this would be a good opportunity to push against the stereotype and make him younger.

Q: You made the ending of “Hair Love” visually ambiguous — in the film we surmise that the mom is being treated for cancer, and that’s why she’s wearing a head wrap, but in the book she could be wearing it for any reason.

A: I wanted all kids to be able to read it over and over, and not every kid may be ready for that particular story, of a mom with cancer.

Q: What work do you have pinned to the wall?

A: I’ve started working with pastels. I bought some really nice ones and it’s something I’m exploring. I’m really attracted to how expressionistic and loose you have to be with pastel. As much as you might like to zoom in, you can’t. So it’s a nice formal way to challenge myself. I love trying to make things look really rendered with the fewest amount of strokes, and trying to make it look the way you would do it on the computer — but you have to do it with a fat piece of chalk.

Q: It looks like you work at this table a lot.

A: You know what’s ridiculous? I finally have all this space to make art, and I often end up sitting on the floor with all of my stuff spread out, just like I did when I was a kid.

Q: How do you choose what to keep on the table?

A: I found these vintage field guides to astronomy and plants. If I was to boil down the two things I want to do most, it’s capture plants and stars. Then I have different journals for everything. The Indiana Jones movies were another big influence on me. I always wanted to have a grail diary, a little leather journal. Now I have many — like 15! Some of them are too nice to write in. Some are for specific things. There’s one for drawing, one for note-taking, one for notes on a specific story. And some are blank because they feel too precious to make a mistake in.

And not everyone does, but I do need a reference when I draw hands.

Q: You do have one book here that looks like it’s from your childhood, “The Book of Goodnight Stories.”

A: I clearly remember this one. It was my older sister’s before it came to me. The stories in it are traditional fairy tales, like “The Magic Flute” and “Sleeping Beauty,” but some of the illustrations have a more contemporary look. I’ve been looking at it a lot lately because I realize some of them are done in pastel, and they have a soft, magical quality to them that I really liked as a kid.

Q: I love the green of your sofa.

A: When I think about the things I love, I think of this one shade of green, maybe almost a hunter green, but with an outdoorsy, springtime feeling, like when the garden is just coming to life. I think a lot about how to make an apartment that I have to be in all the time remind me of the things I like the most.

This article originally appeared in

(Art of the Book)

Vashti Harrison Lets the Light In

Q: How long has this been your studio?

A: Three and a half years. We were preparing to move to New York from Paris, and we had only 10 days to find an apartment to live in, with space for my studio. We wanted to be in Harlem, to be close to my daughter’s school. It was hard, but then we found this brownstone. I love it. The wood built-ins are so good, you don’t need much furniture.

Q: Your studio space is on the top floor, in what would have been a bedroom. How did you make it ready to work in?

A: I put a blue tarp on the walls, because I didn’t want to spoil the brick. Then I put cardboard on the floor to protect it. You know, I need to not think about stains or anything like that. I have sometimes pretty lively movements, and I had to make it work for that.

Q: Do you like having a studio right in your home?

A: I’ve always had to have my studio near where I live. Absolutely. In Paris I had a door to open and I would walk into my apartment.

My studio in Paris was bigger. Sometimes I feel the space here is too small. But then that also makes me feel more free. Because this isn’t really my studio — my studio is in my brain. And so I’ve always thought, do I need a big studio space, or not? In the past I’ve ended up thinking no.

Q: What would be the drawback of a big space?

A: It would be a burden. I love to feel light. My work is really one of ideas: What would happen if I made three dots, one red, one blue, one yellow? You don’t need a big studio for that. It’s really simple. All that simplicity brings me to lightness. I don’t want to have tons of paper around. You can draw with a stick in the sand, at the beach. Maybe one day I’ll do a book like that.

Q: It looks like you still spend lots of time playing around with paint.

A: Sure. But in my work everything is about a simple idea and the energy to project it. My most radical book is “Mix It Up.” I just took paint, put it on my finger and put it on the page. That’s it. That’s what I’m looking for in all my work, that simplicity. I need to make sure the people who get my book can see that I made it with my hand, and I need them to think they are able to do the same. They need to see there is no barrier between the idea and the painting. So you see, the technique is not the most important part. The studio is not the most important part.

Q: And yet you’ve told me that you just bought a barn in France, for a new studio.

A: It’s true. I bought a barn in Normandy, and I’m going to turn it into a studio. It’s the first time I’ll have a really big studio with a lot of space for storage. I’ll have four work tables, instead of one. But if I had had a big studio before, maybe it would have been a bad thing. Maybe I wouldn’t have been able to make my work as simple as it needed to be.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/31/books/herve-tullet-studio.html" id="9bce970d-dbd9-3b75-aa82-9f7c9c9d00bd">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — Hervé Tullet has created over 80 books, perhaps most famously the bestselling, interactive “Press Here,” which invites children to touch and shake its pages. His latest project is “The Ideal Exhibition,” a series of workshops he conducts around the world in which attendees are invited to participate in the art-making process. We spoke at his studio on the top floor of the brownstone he lives in with his family in Manhattan’s Harlem neighborhood. These are edited excerpts from our c...

The Ideas Flow in Hervé Tullet's Studio

Q: How did you arrive at the idea of a young readers’ edition of “Born a Crime,” given that your show is on way past this audience’s bedtime?

A: It was a combination of factors, one of the most prevalent being that a lot of parents were saying their kids loved the book. People would say, I read the book to my 8-year-old, or my 10-year-old, but I wish they had a version they could read for themselves.

Q: What changes did you make?

A: We slightly changed the framing of the book to gear it to a younger reader who doesn’t know about the history of South Africa. And then the main difference is obviously we’ve changed the language a bit. It’s not like the first book is graphic, but we made sure it’s completely suitable for kids of all ages.

Q: There’s that scene when you’re 5 years old and you don’t want to use the outhouse, so you put a piece of newspaper on the kitchen floor — somehow it seems even funnier in the version for kids.

A: Changing the word to “poop” — that small thing makes it more accessible. But everything else in the scene is basically the same. I didn’t want the parents who’d liked the book to not get the same book for their kids.

I think the great stories connect with you regardless of your age. That’s what Pixar and Disney do today — they tell a story, and someone older can take away something different than a younger person does, but the heart of the story remains intact. The stories I loved as a kid are still the stories I love now.

Q: Many people find it hard to figure out a way to talk to kids that’s not condescending.

A: I found it to be a natural mindset, maybe because I thought about telling these stories to my younger brother, who is 17. I speak to him like an adult. I was lucky to grow up in a household where my mother gave me respect and treated me like an adult. That’s important to do with younger readers — they may not have the experience, but they are still functioning human beings and they can grasp the concepts. When I was growing up, Roald Dahl had the biggest impact on me. The way he told a story was so simple, yet so complicated at the same time.

Q: This edition also has to explain South Africa to American children, who generally don’t know about apartheid. How did you approach that?

A: Unfortunately that’s true, that American children don’t learn about apartheid. But also, unfortunately, I could use a lot of American examples as reference points.

Q: You mean like this one: “In America you had the forced removal of the native peoples onto reservations coupled with slavery followed by segregation. Imagine all three of those things happening to the same group of people at the same time. That was apartheid.”

A: That passage is the same in both editions.

Q: Did you worry that young readers wouldn’t get some of the nuances in either the politics or your own story?

A: No — again, that’s the thing, when you look at kids, they understand things on different levels. Look at a child who’s grown up in a harsh environment. I think they understand the nuances of their situation even more than most adults do. A kid will say, my daddy is not a good man when he’s drinking alcohol, but I still love him. Grown-ups can’t do that as easily. I think those sorts of ideas actually connect with kids better. As we grow older, we start holding on to our realities and our knowledge in a more entrenched way, as if it’s who we are. It feels like, if I shake the core of what I know, maybe I’m not as intelligent as I thought I was. Kids don’t struggle with it as much. They are not married to their ideas as much yet.

I think everybody understands a given story within their own context. I loved Dahl’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” I didn’t really like many of the kids in the factory, but I also knew how to process the complications of their particular world. I thought, “this child was spoiled by his parents and that’s why he is the way he is. I’m still sorry he had to fall into the chocolate.” There are complicated ideas children can grasp if the storyteller relates to him in an authentic way. In Harry Potter, you don’t ever think Voldemort is not bad, but you do come to understand how he came to be how he is, and why some people gravitate to him.

Q: Have you been able to speak to groups of kids about the book yet?

A: I have, and it’s been amazing. I guess I’ve never lost a lot of what I enjoyed about being a kid. Part of being a comedian and doing what I do is I try not to lose my imagination. I try to enjoy being silly, so when I hang out with kids and I tell the stories I tell, there’s a beautiful space we exist within.

Q: What do they find most interesting about the book?

A: A lot of kids are fascinated by apartheid itself. They ask, why didn’t the government like black people? For a kid who hasn’t yet internalized the workings of government, there’s an illogic to apartheid that kids just don’t understand.

We take for granted how a lot of the worst ideas are taught to children. We don’t give children enough credit for understanding the difference between right and wrong. You have to really teach a child to understand something that is incorrect. You look at a little child raised in a racist place by parents who are racist. That child waves at a black person, and the parent says “You don’t wave at them!” The child is just existing, he doesn’t understand. Those small moments show you that you really have to be taught the wrong things that you know. Over time we allow life to erase some of the magic that made us who we were. It’s a humbling experience to talk to kids about this book, because their questions remind me that as much as we’d like to forget it, we still are the kids we were growing up.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/26/books/trevor-noah-born-a-crime.html" id="e93b0d6d-a22b-3398-a18b-946fb2de4451">The New York Times</a>.

Trevor Noah Thinks Kids Can Handle the Truth

It’s easy to see how “Born a Crime,” Trevor Noah’s funny and devastating memoir of growing up mixed race in South Africa, became a best-seller. Less predictable was the success of the book’s young readers’ edition, published this month and aimed at children 8 and up. I asked the comedian and talk show host to talk about adapting his story for a much younger audience. These are excerpts from our conversation.

NEW YORK — Artist Oliver Jeffers, born in Northern Ireland and living and working now in Brooklyn, always has a lot going on. So it makes sense that his studio is in the Invisible Dog Art Center, a converted factory that is home to art exhibitions, performances and public art events, as well as studio space for several dozen artists. With Jeffers’ recent public installation, “The Moon, the Earth and Us,” on Manhattan’s High Line,we stopped in to his studio to find out how he makes it all happen. These are edited excerpts from our conversation.

Q: How did you end up here?

A: I found it just by walking past. I was in between studios and I rented it absolutely temporarily. The first project I worked on here was the book “Stuck,” and I fell in love with the community. It felt like a breath of fresh air. The other artists here now are incredible — Mac Premo, Kevin Waldron, Prune Nourry, many others.

There’s all walks of artistic practice here, so you get great advice. I like advice from people who work in a different discipline. Prune, who’s a sculptor, helps me with painting. When you’re at any critical point in a project it’s easy to knock on three people’s doors and get three points of view. But you can also have absolute silence and isolation. I tend to do my best work late into the night or on weekends when there’s not many other people around.

Q: What’s your favorite thing about your space?

A: The charm. There’s a certain charm to it because it’s a really old building. It used to be a factory. There’s a rustic-ness. That of course leads to leaks occasionally, but that’s OK.

I also like the light. It’s southern facing. The daylight just streams in, and especially in the winter it’s quite piercing, which is not great for painting, but it’s very lovely. That’s why I’ve got a separate painting area at the back, which has got a skylight. That light is a little more easy to control.

Q: You have a lot of materials, but they seem very organized.

A: I do have an elaborate organizational scheme. I tend to plunge back and forth between different mediums. In an ideal world my studio would be four times larger. I would like to be able to leave projects sitting there when I’m working on more than one. But because it’s Brooklyn and there is so little space, I get around that by having a pretty organized space, so when I need to get my hands on something I know where it is.

Q: That bin you have for “Mediocre Brushes” is even a bit poignant.

A: I’ve got brushes all divided up. The “Mediocre Brushes” — sometimes if you’re doing a stroke and you need to be quite brush-strokey and not perfect, it’s just the thing. Painting hair, for example, is sometimes easier to do with a really terrible brush.

Q: You also seem to be a fan of to-do lists.

A: Oh yes. One of my favorite things to do is cross things off lists. So much so that one of my habits is I write something that’s already been done, just so I can cross it off. I tell myself, The wheels are turning!

Q: Besides materials, what objects do you like to keep around the studio?

A: Books, of course — I’ve got two areas for books, one for reference and one that is collage material. I’ve got a photograph of my son the day he was born, and he actually looks like a Russian terrorist. I keep it right above my screen, on the blackboard where I’ve written pi to 500 digits. And I always keep globes and maps around.

Q: Your installation on the High Line, “The Moon, the Earth and Us,” had two globes representing the Earth and the Moon. And your latest picture book, too, “Here We Are,” is full of globes and maps. How do you see the relationship between your fine art work and your picture books? You seem to bring the two together as seamlessly as any artist working today.

A: For me the relationship between fine art and children’s books has always been cross-referencing and cross-pollinating in some less obvious ways. But in the last five years it’s happening more and more directly. They’re covering the same lines of inquiry. Sometimes I put it in the form of a book, and sometimes it becomes a painting, or a giant sculpture on the High Line.

Q: Do you think of those audiences as different?

A: It’s all one audience. My audience is just people. The idea of making a book being that the end result is whatever comes off the press and is in the bookshop, while in the gallery the final piece is an individual one-off piece that sits on a wall. But there are different restraints and expectations. With galleries, they are quite vague, there’s no contract. With a book, the structure needs to be more direct and clear. With publishing everything’s up front and crystal clear. That offers a different kind of freedom, though with fine arts, the system lets you go off on tangents.

Q: Which do you like best?

A: I like both! With fine arts you can suggest things and point things out after the fact … it’s more suggestive. But I’ve always been a storyteller too. And I don’t think all artists are storytellers. Some are observers or question-askers. But for me it’s a natural line to straddle.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/09/books/oliver-jeffers-highline-childrens-books-studio.html" id="9fa2806a-8d04-3544-a24d-e191482ff532">The New York Times</a>.

Mapping Oliver Jeffers' World

My mother’s glamorous friend Ronnie gave her “Where the Wild Things Are” as a 40th birthday gift. I was 11, my sister was 10, my brother 18 and out of the house, but it was 1978, and that Maurice Sendak classic was a perfectly sophisticated gift for a grown woman whose children were well past picture-book read-alouds. “Reaching the kids is important, but secondary,” Sendak once said. “First, always, I have to reach and keep hold of the child in me.”

“Where the Wild Things Are” is the first in what Sendak called his “trilogy,” books published many years apart and linked not by shared characters or settings but by a deeper affinity of theme: How we can access an inner life to wrest ourselves out of our childhood families and face the scary larger world, thereby growing up. By now, I’ve read the books many times to my own children, astonished at how much is in them for my grown-up self — about that growing-up process, and about the times I grew up in, too.

My jam in “Where the Wild Things Are” is not the famous six-page wordless sequence in which Max and the Wild Things have a “wild rumpus” — even though, yes, it’s an enduring reminder of the importance of letting loose now and then (surely that’s what Ronnie had in mind for my upstanding mom as she turned 40). But what really hits my sweet spot is the exhilarating moment before that, when Max first escapes from his punishment. He’s been sent to his room without supper, you may recall, for nailing stuff to the walls, chasing the dog with a fork, and yelling “I’ll eat you up!” at his mother when she calls him a “wild thing.” Then it happens: His room turns into a nighttime forest, and “an ocean tumbled by with a private boat for Max and he sailed off through night and day.”

A private boat, appearing just when you feel unjustly confined, outrageously misunderstood ... . The serene grin Sendak put on the boy’s face as he sits in that private boat is, to me, what contentment looks like. The ocean has deepening shades of blue and little whitecaps suggesting the ideal, exhilarating amount of wind. A single tree leans into the left side of the frame — this bit of sea is not too far from land, from home. Like Max, I occasionally wished as a child to escape from my family, and truth be told the urge still pops up. But Max sitting happily in his private boat, land in sight, reminds me that my true desire has always been to be close to the people I love, yet find respite from their demands and intrusions.

When Max gets back home he finds that “his supper was waiting for him” in his room — “and it was still hot.” Is it possible to stay angry at your mother, or anyone, while eating something she’s cooked for you? “Where the Wild Things Are” is considered the book that made American childhood safe for temper tantrums like Max’s, but it’s not appreciated enough for that homey vision of conflict resolution through food.

The second in the trilogy, “In the Night Kitchen,” published in 1970, overflows with food. No surprise: Eating, unlike other carnal pleasures, is a physical experience we carry with us relatively unchanged from childhood to adulthood. Our little protagonist, Mickey, awakens to a “racket” from downstairs, falls “through the dark, out of his clothes,” and ends up in the “night kitchen” with bakers who stay up working “so we can have cake in the morn.” But Mickey plunges into an enormous vat of batter, and is almost baked, until he extricates himself, fashioning the dough around his body into a plane and flying off, then diving into a giant bottle of milk and pouring some into the batter. The cake can be made, after all.

So much about “In the Night Kitchen” jets me back to the 1970s of my childhood. Why did Sendak depict Mickey naked, his little penis in evidence, once he falls out of bed? Defending his choice against the inevitable dreary calls for censorship, Sendak spoke of “the dignity and truth of the human body.” Of course. Still, I can count on one hand the number of picture books I’ve seen with frontal nudity. Sendak himself never did it again. Like so much about the decade it ushered in, “In the Night Kitchen” is out there, defiantly visceral.

With their flattened perspective, the book’s pages have the allure of the poster, brazen, sleek and sturdy. The images look like they were born as ads, or billboards — which, we learned in the 1970s, contained big, subversive messages. A tattered paperback copy of “Subliminal Seduction,” an influential 1974 book by Wilson Brian Key, was in heavy play in my house as I hurtled toward adolescence. Its cover showed a drink with melting ice and asked, “are you being sexually aroused by this picture?” If you looked at it closely, you could make out sexual imagery — penises?! — in the photo. Key informed us that they were present in many ads, the better to appeal to our subconscious and manipulate us. As a prepubescent, it was thrilling to be in on this secret about how the grown-up world operated.

Subliminal seduction, indeed: Sendak’s book is seeded with deeper meanings, not just about “the dignity and truth of the human body” but about his own homosexuality, and his Jewish historical consciousness. The name of his father, Philip, and a tribute to his partner, Eugene Glynn, are right there, on the can of “Philip’s Best Tomatoes” and a building shaped like a milk carton that says “PURE” on one side and “E. Glynn” on the other. Also hidden in plain sight is the historical horror Sendak evokes in the gonzo plotline of a child trying to avoid being put in an oven. “Mickey Oven,” it says in red letters. The bakers carry a container of salt with a Jewish star on it, and their caterpillar-like mustaches evoke Oliver Hardy’s, but also, when you look twice, Hitler’s. (“The Holocaust has run like a river of blood through all my books,” Sendak said once, but does every grown-up shudder, as I did, to see it here, as naked as Mickey himself?)

The third book in the trilogy, “Outside Over There,” published in 1981, covers its darkness of theme with ravishingly beautiful, painterly art. In this book, Sendak is inviting us to grapple with adolescence and its definitive break with the securities of childhood. Hence the more grown-up aesthetic: The archaic cadences of the words and the ornate, cascading illustrations evoke German Romanticism, and also the music of Mozart, which Sendak adored. So long, street-wise 1970s urban vernacular. We’re in the Reagan era now, where leftward-leaning free spirits must find solace in their living rooms, immersed in a PBS-style classicism. Yet the book is not offering some idealized vision of safe, genteel life — far from it. The protagonist, Ida, has a green-eyed prettiness, her hair soft, straight, long and honey-colored, her dress ruffled and draped just so, but her bare feet are enormous and wide, like someone who digs up potatoes on a shtetl.

Ida, who looks about 8 years old, is charged with looking after her baby sister “when Papa was away at sea.” Her mother can’t — she looks paralyzed by grief and depression. But Ida gets distracted while playing her “wonder horn,” and goblins climb in the window and steal the baby, replacing her with “another all made of ice.” Ida goes on a rescue mission to the place called “outside over there,” where she finds her sister among the goblin babies. She plays a “frenzied jig” on her wonder horn until the goblins, caught up in their wild dancing, “quick churned into a dancing stream.” She brings the baby home, triumphant, and finds her mother reading a letter from Papa. He tells Ida to take care of the baby and Mama, “which is just what Ida did.”

In my favorite image, from the beginning of the book, Ida holds the bawling baby while her mother looks off catatonically. They are on a right-hand page, so they attract your eye first, but if you follow the mother’s gaze leftward, there is a shocking piece of visual information: She is looking directly at the goblins, who carry the ladder they’ll use, pages later, to steal the baby. But she does not see them.

Perhaps this is Sendak’s central point in the trilogy: At some moment every child realizes that her parents not only can’t fight off the monsters — they don’t even notice them. If it takes becoming an adult to fully comprehend this, well, that’s why Sendak made his picture books so irresistible to the grown-up gaze. Go and look for yourself.

Beyond The Trilogy: More Sendak For Grown-Ups (And Kids, Too)

‘THE BIG GREEN BOOK’ In 1962, just a year before “Where the Wild Things,” Sendak illustrated this glorious story of a boy who uses magic to trick his dull, “not very nice” old uncle and aunt into seeing things his way. Written by poet Robert Graves, its prose rolls ahead delightfully, while Sendak’s intricate pen-and-ink art seems to be working out the combination of enchantment and mischief he’d soon make his name on.

‘PIERRE’ is part of Sendak’s “Nutshell Library,” four mini-books, almost nursery rhymes, intended for the littlest children. But “Pierre” calls out to the grown-ups too — especially Melville lovers, who will see that Sendak borrowed the title from the subversive, antiheroic novel that followed “Moby-Dick.” Of course, it’s another Melville tale that Sendak’s “Pierre” most evokes: With a boy who responds to everything his parents say with a curt “I don’t care!” he’s created a frisky little Bartleby the Scrivener, he who “preferred not to.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/14/arts/maurice-sendak-enthusiast.html" id="c61930b3-2e94-37f5-ad55-bed4b5b8d6ef">The New York Times</a>.

(The Enthusiast)

In Praise of Maurice Sendak

Q: When did you start writing “On the Come Up”?

A: Even before I wrote “The Hate U Give,” I knew I wanted to write a novel that paid homage to hip-hop. For me, as a teenager, hip-hop was how I saw myself when I didn’t see myself in books. And I could never seem to find books that gave hip-hop its due. A lot of times in young adult books, hip-hop is only used when the characters are at parties — otherwise they’re more into indie rock. But for so many kids, hip-hop is their music, hip-hop is their culture; it speaks to them when other things don’t. I mean, white suburban kids are the biggest consumers of hip-hop.

I had this character, Bri, and I knew she had to be a rapper, but that’s all. I got the idea for the plot after “The Hate U Give,” when I began to deal with challenges to the novel, people trying to censor it. A police union in South Carolina spoke out against the book being on a summer reading list. The union was concerned that it created anti-police sentiments. And it was challenged by some school districts, because of the language. Of course, if they paid attention to what their students were saying in the hallways they would hear many more f-bombs than I could ever write. I knew it wasn’t really about the language, it was the subject matter.

So when I was dealing with my own censorship, I thought of the rappers who had meant so much to me, like Tupac, Biggie, Lauryn Hill and Nas, and how they went through it. I was raised knowing that when hip-hop spoke up, it was always challenged. So often when rappers speak, they’re criticized for how they do it, as opposed to what they actually say.

I was looking to them for inspiration about the censorship I was facing, just as I was trying to write a book about hip-hop. My mantra is: I want to write the way rappers write. They can make us laugh, they can make us cry, they can make us uncomfortable, they can make us feel empowered. When they use hip-hop well, they’re being authentic and true to themselves. When you write for teenagers, they know phoniness a mile away. I have to be real with them even if it makes other adults uncomfortable.

Q: As you wrote, did you feel the weight of the success of “The Hate U Give”?

A: Everyone says the second book is the hardest, and I can attest to that. I felt like I had a thousand eyes looking over my shoulder with every line I wrote, saying “Well, Starr wouldn’t say that.” I had to get into the mindset of writing it for myself, not for readers of “The Hate U Give.” At times I even felt resentful of that book. But I’m happy it was a struggle because I learned to listen to my own voice inside and write for myself first.

Q: How did you set about creating the character of Brianna, who is very different from Starr?

A: It was always going to be a whole different book from “The Hate U Give,” but when I did think about Bri in relationship to Starr, it was with the idea of going in the exact opposite direction. People tell me all the time, “I love that Starr has such a stable and functional family.” Well, Bri’s family is not as stable and functional. Who’s to say a young lady with a family like that doesn’t deserve to have her story told? People tell me, “I love how Starr handles herself.” Well, here’s a young lady who speaks from her heart and speaks without thinking.

This is another story set in Garden Heights, but I do not want anyone to assume their lives are the same. I hope some readers walk away learning that even black kids from the same place are totally different.

Q: I thought it was brave of you to give Bri an “anger management issue,” given the stereotypes about “angry black women” out there.

A: For sure, black girls get that “angry black girl” stereotype put on them, and it doesn’t allow them to be angry. It was important to me to let her have her anger and own it — there’s nothing wrong with anger, and I wanted to show that being angry doesn’t have to mean being irrational. Men get to be angry all the time.

Q: Did becoming involved with student activism after “The Hate U Give” change your approach to fiction writing?

A: To me it all comes down to writing stories that people ultimately want to read, and keeping that the priority. But I do think about those kids a lot, and how I influence them. I remind myself, and I tell my fellow writers, that the kids we write for today are going to be politicians with Twitter accounts tomorrow. I know what these kids read now will affect the people they become. I’m a firm believer that if our current leaders read books about black kids when they were kids, we wouldn’t be where we are today. If they read books about Latino kids, they wouldn’t be calling for walls.

Q: In this book you do something really well that we rarely see on the page, which is lay out the interior, mental process of composing a rap, or any kind of rhyming verse, for that matter.

A: I have the utmost respect for rappers, specifically the ones who are good! Because word play and sentence structure and flow and all that, they are not easy to do. I was mainly going on how I did it when I was a teenager. I asked myself, what made me decide to rhyme this word with that word? So often hip-hop is written off, and people don’t consider it an art form. In showing Bri’s mindset as she does her rhymes, I wanted to show people that this is not easy, you really have to have a talent, and study and learn and take it seriously if you want to do it well. It was many, many drafts!

Q: One of the other pleasures of this book is the presence of Bri’s grandparents and their church friends. You found the comedy in them but also, there are some deep ideas about generations and families.

A: A lot of this book was inspired by my own teenage years. My big tragedy was when my mom lost her job and it put my family into crisis mode, but I also drew on how I grew up living in a nontraditional two-parent household — and I say nontraditional because my two parents were my mom and my grandma. That’s a reality for a lot of kids, but it also can be messy. My family was more functional than Bri’s, but my grandmother too was a huge part of my upbringing.

Also, I wanted Bri’s story to be parallel to hip-hop’s story. When I think of hip-hop in relation to soul and R&amp;B;, in a lot of ways those are the grandparents of hip-hop. Artists in those genres will criticize hip-hop, and don’t understand it. But you can’t disconnect hip-hop from R&amp;B;, from the blues, from gospel even. Bri’s grandparents don’t always understand her or agree with her, but they’re still connected to her and influence her.

Q: You focused a little more on teenage romance in this book, too. Why did you decide to go there?

A: I always feel like I drop the ball on the romance part — and you know, it’s not a requirement of a young adult book by any means, but sometimes it feels as though, you should have something in there. I just never want to make my readers feel as if they have to have this happening in their lives, they have to act a certain way. With Bri, we see this crush she’s had for so long, but I raise the question: “Just because this is the person I’ve liked for so long, is this the person I should be with?”

Q: Have you already started another novel?

A: I have, and I’m still writing to find out what happens. All I can tell you is, it’s also set in Garden Heights.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/31/books/angie-thomas-on-the-come-up-hate-you-give.html" id="364244fd-0989-3705-a2e7-28a598e4dead">The New York Times</a>.

Few first novelists have the kind of success Angie Thomas saw with “The Hate U Give,” which has spent 100 weeks on the Times Best-Seller list and been made into an equally acclaimed movie. Perhaps even fewer write a second novel that gets as many advance raves as Thomas’ “On the Come Up,” which will be published this month. It’s set in the same fictional community, Garden Heights, as “The Hate U Give,” but Thomas turns her attention away from Starr (the protagonist in her first novel) to the ...

'I Want to Write the Way Rappers Write': Angie Thomas Lets Hip-Hop Speak in Her New Novel

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