My Kirkus Q&A with Nina Crews
February 1st, 2018 by jules
“I started thinking about illustrating [Richard Wright’s] haiku back in 2006 after I came across a few of them in a poetry anthology. I had read Native Son and The Outsider in my twenties and had more or less dismissed his work as too polemical for my tastes. I was surprised and delighted by the poems. A quick search online led me to a posthumously published collection of over 800 of his haiku, Haiku: This Other World.
In addition to hundreds of wonderful poems, this book included a terrific introduction that gave me a new perspective on Wright and backmatter that gave me a deeper understanding of this poetic form. Creating this book was an opportunity for me to reconsider my feelings about Wright’s work. I am now a fan.”
Over at Kirkus today, I talk with author-illustrator Nina Crews, pictured here, about her new picture book, Seeing into Tomorrow: Haiku by Richard Wright (Millbrook Press, February 2018), which features her photo-collage illustrations.
The Q&A is here. Next week, I’ll follow up here at 7-Imp with some art from the book.
Until tomorrow …
Photo of Nina Crews taken by Matthew Septimus.
