Debbie Levy's Blog, page 2

Jackpot!

I have five books coming out this year. I am really not particularly prolific; some could have come out last year, some next year. They’re all from different publishers, though, and each of these publishers independently decided: 2019.

My point is that I feel like I have hit the 2019 jackpot for beautiful book art. You may already know of the book that was released in January, This Promise of Change, co-authored with Jo Ann Allen Boyce, cover art by the fabulous Ekua Holmes. (Bloomsbury Children’s Books.) And now I have the art for a picture book that will be published in August by Kar-Ben Books. It’s called The Key From Spain, and it’s the story of Flory Jagoda, now a nonagenarian, who is known as the keeper of the flame of Sephardic music, as well as of the Ladino language. Flory traces her family back to Al-Andalus–medieval Muslim Spain–and then to Turkey and Bosnia, where she grew up. The illustrations are by Sonja Wimmer, and they bring all of Flory’s multiple heritages and influences to life. I’ll say again: jackpot.

 

 

January Was Launch Month

What a month January was for me, my co-author Jo Ann Allen Boyce, and our new book about her experience desegregating a Tennessee high school  in 1956, This Promise of Change. First, we visited schools in the Washington, DC area–thanks to An Open Book Foundation and East City Bookshop–and had our East Coast book launch at Politics & Prose Bookstore. (Those are cookies you see in the photo.) Expectations were exceeded all around.

             

Jo Ann traveled east from Los Angeles, where she lives, and she came with family. We planned months in advance to visit the National Museum of African American History and Culture, jumping on the Internet early one morning way back when to grab tickets for our crew. But then: the shutdown. So disappointing for these out-of-towners, who haven’t yet been to this amazing museum. But a friend at the Supreme Court Historical Society came to the rescue and took us on a fabulous tour of the Court–including the basketball court on the top floor, also known as “the highest court in the land.” Also thrilling for all was meeting Gary Kemp, deputy clerk of the Supreme Court. Like Jo Ann, he’s from the South, and they had some stories to trade.

   

Then, later in January, it was time for our book’s West Coast launch–or, rather, launches, as we were hosted first by LA’s Children’s Book World and then by Pasadena’s Vroman’s Bookstore. Both are outstanding places for anyone who loves, or even just likes, books. We met warm, interested, interesting people. We simply loved it all. And I can tell you that anyone who heard Jo Ann speak of her experience and her refusal to give in to hatred and  resentment came away enriched. I know I do every time we speak.

   

 

 

This Promise of Change

Last summer–as in, the summer of 2017–I excitedly shared news of a book I was working on:

How the months roll by! The book is now in page proofs, with a new title: This Promise of Change: One Girl’s Story in the Fight for School Equality. And it has a gorgeous cover with artwork by the talented, award-winning Ekua Holmes. I love it so much I am setting it out here as big as I can make it. At the front of the line of teenagers pictured here is co-author Jo Ann Allen Boyce. Her eleven classmates (together they were known as the Clinton 12) are there, too; notably, her best friend from high school–and still her friend today, now that they are in their 70s–Gail Ann Upton Epps, in the pink sleeveless blouse, wearing glasses. I can’t wait for you to meet them on the page when the book is released on January 8, 2019.

Coming in 2019: RBG Graphic Bio

Working on this book has been so rewarding. I’ve learned even more about Justice Ginsburg’s life, work, and essential RBGoodness, and also learned the challenges and pleasures of writing in the graphic novel format. I had an excuse for indulging one of my guilty pleasures–listening to audio files of Supreme Court oral arguments, from the 1970s to today.

And Justice Ginsburg generously sat down with me last August for a wide-ranging interview which, yes, was a life highlight. 

The manuscript is done–written, revised dozens of times, edited and re-edited, and then edited some more–and now I look forward to watching Whitney Gardner animate it with her vibrant art. Based on the sketches she produced last year, I know I will not be disappointed, and neither will readers.

But illustrating the panels for a graphic-novel-style book of 200+ pages takes time. So here’s something to tide you over: the terrific documentary film called, simply, RBG. (I had nothing to do with the movie! I just really like it.) Take the kids, the students, the parents, the grandparents! Enjoy. And please mark your to-be-read calendars: Becoming RBG: Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Journey to Justice, coming August 2019.

Look Who’s Marching

Sent my way from women’s marches this past weekend:

New York

Oklahoma

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

While I’m posting photos, here’s one thanks to Katy Kelly, who came upon this scene on the D.C. Metro around the time of the holidays. I do enjoy a good RBG sighting:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jane Addams Peace Association Festivities

In October I attended the festivities for the Jane Addams Peace Association Book Awards, where I Dissent: Ruth Bader Ginsburg Makes Her Mark received an Honor award for younger readers. At the awards ceremony, JAPA Book Award Committee member Beth McGowan gave an introduction to my book that I thoroughly enjoyed, but did not manage to capture in video, audio, or print. So I was happy to receive the JAPA online newsletter over the weekend, which includes Beth’s thoughts about I Dissent. I’m sharing her remarks here–you’ll have to forgive my immodesty, but it’s not every day that someone says such lovely things about one’s efforts!

Here is the newsletter link, with the essay in question right at the top. The good people of the Jane Addams Peace Association have also posted my own little talk that day. Giving speeches is not my favorite thing on earth to do (is it anyone’s?), but I was facing a friendly and receptive audience of adults and children, and had a perfectly fine time. Thank you to  the JAPA Book Award Committee! Thank you, Beth McGowan!

From Beth McGowan’s remarks:

A Manuscript, And A Heroine You Don’t Know

Handing in a manuscript to an editor ahead of deadline–what a great feeling! That’s what I did yesterday. (Did this act wipe out my feelings of discouragement about the day’s news? No. But it did provide a respite.) And it occurred to me this morning that I’ve been so busy researching and writing, I haven’t said a word about this book on my own website–not even when we announced it back in March! I’m correcting that lapse today.

The book, written with the dear and wonderful Jo Ann Allen Boyce, is titled Down The Hill: One Girl’s Story of Walking into History. It’s the story of Jo Ann’s experience as one of the Clinton 12. The Clinton 12 were twelve black high school students who, in 1956, and in the face of sustained harassment and ugly violence, were among the first to desegregate a public school in the South. That school was Clinton High School in Tennessee.

In 1956, the events surrounding the desegregation of Clinton High School were splashed across the front pages of newspapers and magazines throughout the United States. The stories came into living rooms on the nightly television news. Eyes across America were on the little town of Clinton, Tennessee, and on Jo Ann and her classmates.

And yet today relatively few people know about what happened in Clinton. These events, so consequential in civil rights history and so widely known in their day, became lost to most of us. A year later, a vicious new desegregation crisis took place at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Three years after that, a poignant drama unfolded in New Orleans when little Ruby Bridges walked into William Frantz Elementary School. The nation’s attention moved on, and the history books followed.

In Down The Hill, we’re telling the story of what happened in Clinton from Jo Ann’s point of view. She was a high school junior in 1956. I first got a glimpse of who she was as a 15-year-old when, on YouTube, I found Edward R. Murrow’s “See It Now” CBS television news show that aired in January 1957 about the crisis in Clinton. There’s Jo Ann on the screen, speaking with both frustration and patience about the struggle of being one of twelve black students at Clinton High School. This was one poised teenager.

I got additional glimpses of the teenage Jo Ann when I read newspaper interviews she gave during and after the Clinton crisis. Her comments to the Baltimore Afro-American in January 1957 were typical. The reporter asked Jo Ann to describe her experience in Clinton. “Let me tell you the good stuff first,”  the article reported her saying. Here, I thought, is a person with a heart as big as the movement she advanced. No wonder the headline of that story read “Jo Ann Allen, heroine of Clinton school fight.”

Jo Ann and I connected in the spring of 2015, after her daughter-in-law, Libby Boyce, put a post about her and the Clinton 12 on Facebook, and my literary agent, Caryn Wiseman, brought it to my attention. We hit it off, and then proceeded to work for more than two years to produce our manuscript, going back and forth with long emails and longer telephone calls (we live across the country from each other); visiting Clinton, Tennessee, together, and the little museum there that’s dedicated to the Clinton 12; sharing a milkshake at the drugstore luncheonette that barred Jo Ann and all black people from eating there when she lived in Clinton; visiting with two other members of the Clinton 12; working through the shape and scope of this book.

And now it’s in our editor’s hands. Before long, if all goes well, it’ll be in yours.

With RBG at the Library of Congress: Video

Back in March, I had the opportunity to appear at the Library of Congress Young Readers Center with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. We spoke before a small audience of D.C. school children, their teachers, and a few others. Thrill #1: Meeting and being introduced by Carla Hayden, the first woman and first African American to hold the office of Librarian of Congress. Thrill #2: Reading a few pages from my book I Dissent under the watchful and twinkling eye of the lady it’s all about, Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Thrill #3: Interviewing RBG before this very appreciative audience!

The Library of Congress recently posted its video of the event, and I post it here. Of course, I have to avert my eyes, and kind of only half-listen, when I click “play” on the video. (Surely I’m not the only person who is squeamish about seeing herself on tape.) Setting that aside, here are my favorite parts, identified by Minutes:Seconds so you can scroll right to them. There’s much laughter throughout–

11:17 (RBG explaining how the Supreme Court works), 13:58 (talking about her parents and life in her Brooklyn neighborhood), 15:11 (home ec class and singing), 18:15 (attending college at Cornell). Kids’ questions start at 33:48, and the first one was: “Were you involved in the Women’s March?” I love her answer; she pauses midway through, but you’ll  want to listen all the way to 35:00.

A Slice Of RBGoodness For Mother’s Day

In advance of Mother’s Day, one of my favorite Ruth Bader Ginsburg vignettes:

There she is, then-Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg, standing in the White House Rose Garden with President Bill Clinton, who has just introduced her as his nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court. He’s made his remarks, and now she is making hers. Her daughter Jane, a professor at Columbia Law School (like her mother before her!), is  out of the country. But RBG puts her front and center, as a mother does:

RBG: My daughter Jane reminded me a few hours ago in a good luck call from Australia of a sign of the change we have had the good fortune to experience. In her high school yearbook on her graduation in 1973, the listing for Jane Ginsburg under “ambition” was “to see her mother appointed to the Supreme Court.”

(Laughter)

RBG: The next line read “If necessary, Jane will appoint her.”

Another laugh, of course. Delightful.

You can watch it all here. The excerpt comes up just before the 4 minute mark.

 

 

That Tote Bag

I receive a surprising number of inquiries about That Tote Bag–the “I Dissent” tote bag that I carry around and that a certain Supreme Court justice has been photographed with.

Where can I get one? Is it for sale? people ask me. It is not; the bag was a limited-run promotional item handed out last year by Simon & Schuster, publisher of I Dissent: Ruth Bader Ginsburg Makes Her Mark. But! The book’s illustrator, who created the design for this tote bag, has created several new variations on it and is offering them for sale on the Society6 website. Have a look:

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Do you like them? They are a click away, right here. Prefer your dissent in other forms, like a pillow or a print or a mug or a shirt? No problem: she’s got you covered. Enjoy!