Blog

BackList friend Javaka Steptoe was interviewed by PW Children's Bookshelf.

AMIRI AND ODETTE which is a retelling of Swan Lake is a beautiful book all around. Necessary for all book collections!

Here's a snippet of the interview:

Walter Dean Myers says in his introduction that the idea of turning Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake into a struggle between two young men in a contemporary housing project took a long time to grow in his mind. Did it take you a long time to figure out how you were going to do the artwork?

It took me a very long time. It doesn't usually take that long! I usually only take about a year on a project. I probably got the contract in '98 or '99. When I first got the original story of Swan Lake--that was the working title for a long time--it was much longer and there was still a lot of editing down to do. I was thinking, Walter Myers was thinking, [Scholastic editor] Liz Szabla was thinking....

I was thinking about state of urban culture, the things the audience was interested in--what they wanted to see. There was this catchphrase at the time: Represent the street! I thought about that a lot. I thought about my grandmother and how she raised my mother in the Harlem River projects. I looked at a lot of graffiti magazines. I was thinking about the cinematic quality of the story, how it was so visual. I was thinking, Should I paint this on a wall? Could I go to some housing project and paint this on a wall?

Read the entire interview.