Hello community!

“‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers” is a famous poem by Emily Dickinson where hope “never stops.” For me, the feather metaphor telegraphs that hope is fragile, but the visual metaphor I prefer is the HOPE sculpture by Robert Indiana at the corner of 7th Avenue and 53rd street in New York City. Here, HOPE is Solid. Durable. Quirky. Strong.

Both metaphors together make me realize that Art is the thing that can make HOPE feel real, solid, and resilient.

I’ve been thinking a lot about hope, the art of writing, and community over the past few months – especially amid all the chaos and mean-spirited political theater that aims to divide and belittle already marginalized folks.

In her opening remarks at the recent Society of Children’s Books Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) 2025 in-person winter conference, Sarah Baker said it is a “creative act of rebellion to gather our community together.” I whole-heartedly agree.

And while it’s asynchronous, I thank you for gathering here around these updates, inspirations, and book recommendations. You are my community, and I’m grateful for that!

With no further preamble, delivered in a new bullet-point form:

• Join me and a lot of other fabulous KidLit folks for the SCBWI Golden Kite Awards this Friday February 21, 2025 from 4pm-5:30pm Pacific. It’s a free online award ceremony, and my THE GENDER BINARY IS A BIG LIE is one of five finalists in the Nonfiction for Older Readers category. I’m super excited to have one of my books receive this honor and you can resister for the event here.

• The end of one calendar year and the beginning of the next bring with it a raft of “best of” and “award” lists. With three books out in 2024, I admit I paid more attention than usual to these, hoping my books would get a bit of those moments in the spotlight. With the exception of the above Golden Kite finalist moment, that didn’t happen. I wrote about processing that here, What to do when your book is not on the “best of” list.

• I have a new picture book “Like That Eleanor: The Amazing Power of Being an Ally” coming out this April! It’s about a little girl with two dads named after Eleanor Roosevelt, how she wants to make things more fair, and how she’s inspired to do that by real things THAT Eleanor did in history. We’re celebrating on publication day by sharing it with kids and the larger kidlit community. Please join me for this free online reading Apr 1, 2025 at 10am Pacific/1pm Eastern – register here

• BRAVE Kickstarter update: We just ordered and delivered lots more copies of “A Different Kind of Brave” (12 cases of 32 copies each)! They shipped out in partnership with We Need Diverse Books to hundreds of Queer and allied teens all across the US. It’s so amazing that together we made this happen — and are now empowering hundreds more teens with this gay teen action adventure romance! If you helped make that happen, THANK YOU!

• I’ve been hard at work drafting the next adventure for Sam and Nico, the sequel to “A Different Kind of Brave.” You’re the first to hear about it (it hasn’t been officially announced yet)… The book will come out in 2026, and I promise I’ll keep you updated.

• I hosted the LGBTQ+ and Allies social at the SCBWI Winter Conference, and after talking about how we were all doing with Trans and gender diverse people specifically and our Queer community generally being under attack, we shared words of wisdom and hope as well as Queer KidLit we’ve been enjoying. Read up on those here.

• With more than 100 folks in the community and counting, Queer KidLit Creators is going strong! We meet online once a month, and have a bunch of cool volunteer-run initiatives (including a daily writing study hall, a critique corner, and upcoming in-person NYC meet-ups.) Our next online meetings will be Sat Feb 22 and Sun Mar 16, 2025. Sign up and learn more here.

• We Are Stronger Than Censorship is a program fighting back against book banning that I co-created as part of my day job at the Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA.) We’re buying and donating two books for every one book challenge, with the idea of putting brakes on the runaway train of book banning. So far we’ve raised the money to buy and donate the first 1,000 books! Learn more here. Every $16 donation buys and donates two books to offset one book challenge, and you can also buy t-shirts and other fun swag, each of which includes a $16 donation to the program. Shop (and donate) here.

• I was interviewed by Brooke Warner and Grant Faulkner on their wonderful podcast Write-Minded. We had a great discussion, Creating the Heroes You Want to See in the World, and you can listen here.

• February 14th’s Valentine’s Day festivities may have passed, but love is important all the other days of the year, too. In that spirit, here are seven wonderful Queer love and Queer family love picture books for you to check out: Love, Violet: Joyful Song: A Naming Story; How Mom Met Mama; Julian is a Mermaid; Marley’s Pride; And Tango Makes Three; and my own Love of the Half-Eaten Peach.

A final note of inspiration: This sign was in the airport on a recent trip, and I stopped in my tracks when I saw it: Fear is contagious. So is hope.

HOPE is the thing with wings that never stops and it is strong, resilient, and quirky. Let’s spread hope. And together, we can make things better.

The light in me recognizes and acknowledges the light in you,
Lee