BookSmitten Kelly J. Baptist, Heather Shumaker, Patrick Flores-Scott, Jack Cheng

Illustrator, animator, and storyteller Darnell Johnson joins us to talk about making art for picture books. We dive into his career and process, handling feedback and criticism, and serving the visions we have for our books and ourselves.

We continue work on our picture book manuscripts by revisiting the concept of story questions from our "Building Frames for Story Houses" episode. We identify the questions in our own stories, and see what answers might come up.

Award-winning author and artist Yuyi Morales joins us from her home in Mexico to talk about discovering the public library as an adult, about encouragement and discouragement, and about the exchange of storytelling that happens between author and reader – particularly the importance of seeing and being seen as children, writers, and artists.

The crew shares their feelings (and even a few snippets) from their BookSmitten Challenge picture book rough drafts.

Ann Whitford Paul's "Writing Picture Books" is a significant inspiration for this season's BookSmitten Challenge, and this week the team is honored to have her join the podcast for a conversation about the writing process.

The BookSmitten crew discusses our homework for the week—writing a story question for our mentor text, considering what themes the books explored. If our picture books are houses, then the story questions are the foundation around which we’ll build our frames when we write our first drafts.