Dan Santat joins Joanna and Caroline to celebrate the launch of their book The Day the Books Disappeared! They share an honest conversation around the impacts of book banning, challenges within the publishing industry at large, and the need for art that continues to push back.

To snag swag and copies of The Day the Books Disappeared signed by both Joanna and Caroline, order from Linden Tree Books

To get swag and a signed, personalized copy by Caroline, order from Politics and Prose

Here are some highlights from our episode with the #1 NYTimes bestselling, National Book Award-winning, former National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature Jacqueline Woodson:

• Starting stories with questions
• Writing "quiet" books that speak loudly
• The wisdom of young people, especially before that wisdom is silenced
• Deconstructing “show don’t tell”
• How to write about complicated topics with honesty and hope
• Separating yourself as a writer from the character and the story
• The questions Jackie is wrestling with right now
• Some things that have (and haven’t) changed about publishing

Jacqueline Woodson is an American writer of books for adults, children, and adolescents. She is best known for her National Book Award-Winning memoir Brown Girl Dreaming, and her Newbery Honor-winning titles After Tupac and D Foster, Feathers, and Show Way. Her picture books The Day You Begin and The Year We Learned to Fly were NY Times Bestsellers. After serving as the Young People’s Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2017, she was named the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature by the Library of Congress for 2018–19. She was awarded the Hans Christian Andersen Medal in 2020. Later that same year, she was named a MacArthur Fellow.

Links from the episode:

• Mychal Threet’s “The Library Is for Everyone” shirt via Out of Print
• The Baldwin Fellowship Program
• Harbor Me by Jacqueline Woodson
• Before the Ever After by Jacqueline Woodson
• The Other Side by Jacqueline Woodson
• After Tupac and D Foster by Jacqueline Woodson

Highlights from our conversation with Founder and Publisher of Kokila, Namrata Tripathi:

• The power of celebrating not just our communal work, but also ourselves
• Voice as an essential point of view with no illusion of neutrality
• How cheap workarounds subvert the hard work of uncovering our own voice
• The power of words like “intuition” (despite how it may come off as fluffy or weak)
• Supporting writers in identifying who they are actually in conversation with on the page
• The lifelong work of knowing how to be more honest with ourselves and the world
• The priceless bit of publishing wisdom a former boss shared
• How Kokila’s intentional approach to each facet of publishing is intrinsically tied to the books they put out into the world.

Namrata Tripathi is Founder and Publisher of Kokila. Previously, Namrata held editorial positions at HarperCollins, Disney-Hyperion, and Simon and Schuster. She is the editor of New York Times bestsellers Hair Love by Matthew A. Cherry and Vashti Harrison and Antiracist Baby by Ibram X. Kendi and Ashley Lukashevsky; the Newbery Honor-winning middle grade novel The Night Diary by Veera Hiranandani; and the National Book Award Finalists Noggin by John Corey Whaley, Patron Saints of Nothing by Randy Ribay, and The Legend of Auntie Po by Shing Yin Khor. Namrata grew up in Afghanistan, India, Canada, Pakistan, Germany, and Poland, and has happily called New York City home for the last twenty-five years.