Tuesday's breakfast keynote at ABA's Children's Institute in New Orleans, La., featured author Renée Watson, whose bestselling titles include Piecing Me Together, winner of a Newbery Honor and Coretta Scott King Award; the Ryan Hart series; and acclaimed picture books like Maya's Song and The 1619 Project: Born on the Water, written with Nikole Hannah-Jones. All the Blues in the Sky (Bloomsbury), the title she focused on in her keynote, will be released February 4, 2025.
ABA's Joy Dallanegra-Sanger greeted booksellers and welcomed Cathy Berner of Blue Willow Bookshop in Houston, Tex., to the stage to introduce Watson. Being a bookseller "is the best job in the world," Berner proclaimed, and Watson and her titles are part of why bookselling cannot be beat--"Renée Watson and her books provide joy to readers of all age levels." All the Blues in the Sky, Berner said, exemplifies Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop's "Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors" concept. To quote Nicole Brinkley of Oblong Books in Rhinebeck, N.Y., Berner said, the book is "an earnest balm to the soul for young readers who want a sincere, hopeful meditation on grief." The author's work, Berner stated, is like Watson herself, "gorgeous and engaging."
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Watson opened her speech with a tone-setting quote from Maya Angelou: "My greatest hope is that I laugh as much as a I cry." This quote, Watson explained, guarantees readers that there will be sorrow in this life. But, hopefully, the moments of joy will match those of loss and pain. "I do not write for children to escape reality," Watson said, "I write to help them cope with it." Throughout her speech, the author borrowed lines from several of her books to outline the bittersweet nature of life and to highlight her desire to write in that space. "Pilots see many shades of blue in the sky," she read from All the Blues in the Sky. "Everyone loves those beautiful blue skies. But sometimes? Sometimes the sky is dark blue.... And sometimes life is blue, too."
What Watson said she wants to do is "talk about all the blues we carry." She spoke directly to the audience, noting that she doesn't know what memories they hold, the last time they cried, what makes their belly ache with laughter, "but it's all here in this room with us. Young people carry their stories with them, too." And that is who Watson is writing for: every child who needs a safe space to heal, to be seen, to be validated. Kids, she said, need to have books where they see characters grappling with intense feelings while holding on to gratefulness. "They need to see that they can survive this. That it's okay to have big wild dreams. It's okay to cry."
This is, Watson noted, "joy as resistance." Joy is internal, she said, "a kind of knowing that anchors the soul when chaos is erupting." Through book bans and the erasure of marginalized voices, "we will not give up. We will press on, even with tears in our eyes. Even with heavy hearts." Our young people, Watson said, "need to know that they can get up. That they can survive. That they can do hard things. And I believe that books can show them how." She wants young readers to feel connected to the creators who "left a blueprint on how to survive this world." Because, after all, "someone, somewhere, loves the young person we are handing a book to. Someone, somewhere has big wild dreams for that young person. It is never lost on me that I am writing for someone's child. Someone's best thing. Someone's hope. Someone's tomorrow."
Ultimately, Watson expressed hope that her books about the ups and downs of life can act as a "soft place to land" for her young readers. "Life is not all good or all bad. Life is a mixture of both. Sometimes on the same day, the best and worst things are happening all at once." Sometimes, she said, you don't even know what you're feeling. "Friends," she said to the booksellers in attendance, "what you do is no small thing. Thank you for persevering through a pandemic. For taking a stand against book banning. For enduring your own personal standards and still being a safe place and a beacon of light in your communities." --Siân Gaetano, children's and YA editor, Shelf Awareness