Debbie and her mom, ready to go to the launch!
The staff at 57th Street Books is terrific! Several people greeted us and worked on creating the space. That meant moving books from the shelves in back...
to the signing table... and moving shelves to set up chairs and the screen for our power point presentation.
The book shelves are on wheels so they can be moved to other locations for events.
Jean's husband, Durango, is a photographer. Here he is, taking some test shots before everyone arrived. Photos of the photographers are rare. This one was taken by Debbie's husband, George.
We were delighted that #DiversityJedi were in the house! Here's Elisa and Patrick (and Debbie):
The original plan for the launch was that Bernardine Dohrn would moderate the conversation between Roxanne, Jean, and Debbie. Unfortunately, Roxanne couldn't be there due to illness. Here's Abigail (of 57th Street Books), Jean, Debbie, and Bernardine, just before our presentation got started.
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We are pausing here to insert links to Twitter threads from people who were there. If you click on their names you'll go to their threads and see what they said on Twitter. There's also several photos in their threads. I'll add more as I find them.
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At 3:00, Abigail introduced us to a packed room. There may have been 40 or so people there and lot of people bought books! In fact, they sold out. A teacher, Autumn Laidler got the last copy. Ben Kovacs snapped a photo of Autumn. Here's a screen capture of his tweet of her with the last copy:
Elisa Gall gave us a delightful gift! Cookies, iced with an image of the book cover!
Here's another photo of the photographer taking a photo of us at our signing table. In this one you can see the stack of Diversity in Children's Books 2018 infographic postcards that we were giving away.
We use the infographic in the opening sequence of our presentation. Here it is, for those who haven't seen it yet. For details about it, go to Dr. Sarah Park Dahlen's website:
I asked the illustrator, David Huyck, to create another illustration of the Native child on the left, that we could use to signify a Native child's joy at seeing books that affirm their existence. He did (thanks, David!) and we used it as the final slide in our presentation. It was wonderful to hear the audience exclaim and see them raising their cameras to take a photo of it.
That's all, for now! We may be back to add links to Facebook posts or Twitter threads, or to add more photos!
