Shadra Strickland

Shadra Strickland:
Come on Jabe and Dancing in the Wings are my two absolute favorite and I think it's because it was so linear. There was so much draw. You could see the line and there was a lightness to it that I just absolutely love.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Before we could read, before we could speak, and maybe even before we could understand stories at all, we all turned the pages of books because of the pictures and for most of us, those illustrations were our very first encounter with art. Our mind expanding introduction to the idea that lines on paper could mean something, a moon, a caterpillar, an island full of wild things. Those memorable lines on paper stay with us for life. We focus a lot on novelists here on the podcast, but today we talk instead to someone who's early love for picture books ultimately led to an acclaimed career creating those images herself. Shadra Strickland won the Ezra Jack Keats Illustration Award for her work on 2008's Bird, written by Zetta Elliot. She went on to illustrate 2011's White Water by Eric Stein and Michael S Bandy, and 2014's, Please Louise by Toni Morrison and Slade Morrison among many others, but with 2023's release of Jump In!, Shadra began to soar as a solo artist taking on both illustrations and authorship herself.

Shadra Strickland:
I just wrote and my agent kept a folder of all of our work and I tossed it in there and she immediately was like, "Where have you been hiding this?" And I think she sewed it within a week.

In this episode, Shadra joins us to discuss this inflection point in her career and her journey, which began with reading and drawing under her grandmother's kitchen table. We'll also hear about the nuts and bolts of her illustrating process, her thoughts on AI generated picture books and why Beyonce would only be Shadra's number two choice to play her in a biopic. My name is Jordan Lloyd Bookey, and this is The Reading Culture, a show where we speak with authors and reading enthusiasts to explore ways to build a stronger culture of reading in our communities. We dive into their personal experiences, their inspirations, and why their stories and ideas motivate kids to read more.

Let's start off with talking about your early experiences. Did you live with your mom and your grandma, did you all three live together?

Shadra Strickland:
No. So I lived with my mom, but my mom was a teacher and we lived sort of out of zone of where she wanted me to go to school and so I was able to take the school bus to my grandmother's house every day after school. So for like K through five, I spent every afternoon at my grandma's house and spent a lot of time with her.

Oh, that's so nice and did your grandmother ever see some of the work that you created?

Shadra Strickland:
Oh yeah. Oh yeah. She was alive for Bird. She passed away 2016 and then my mom passed away 2017, so that was a rough couple of years but yeah, she was so happy. Sunday Shopping, a story about a little girl, Evie and her grandmother who shopped by cutting things out of the newspaper was her favorite because that's exactly what we used to do when I was at her house. We opened the wish book and just pick out all the things that we couldn't afford that we would buy and when she saw it, she key ke-ke'd and laughed so hard, threw her head back. She was like, "Is that me and you?" I was like, "It sure is grandma. It sure is." That's what she did.

I love the style of that book too.

Shadra Strickland:
Thank you.

When I talked to you in 2014 it was, I looked back, we had this other conversation, you at that time you were talking about working on your book that just came out that we'll talk about in a little bit, Jump In!, I don't know if it was Jump In!.

Shadra Strickland:
Yes, that was Jump In!.

But the things kind of came to a halt with your mom, I'm guessing, and your grandma, that's like a really traumatic couple of years.

Shadra Strickland:
Yeah. It was rough. It was rough. My grandmother was up in age, so we were expecting it and she was ready to go, so we were all very grateful for her to be able to transition. It was not fun at the end of her life and she made peace with it. She kept, every time I saw her ,"Shadra, I just don't know why I'm still here," and I'm like, "Well, if you start being nicer to people, maybe Jehovah will let you go." She was a Jehovah's Witness and we had a lot of jokes together, so that made her chuckle but then my mom was unexpected. I had just purchased my home in 2017 and the plan was always for her to live with me and enjoy her retirement and I wanted us to travel together and spend all this time and she was diagnosed with Pulmonary Fibrosis and they'd given her a timeline, but I am a foolish optimist and don't always agree with medical diagnoses and I'm like, "Well, if we exercise, if we take good care of ourselves, we can do this, we can do that."

So it was apparent that she couldn't be at home by herself. She had an episode at home. My cousin is a physician's assistant at Emory and was able to meet her at the hospital and she was like, "She can't be by herself." So I had to drive down. I literally, I moved into my house maybe two weeks prior, had to drive down to Atlanta, pack her entire house and her dog and get oxygen tanks and all the things and then bring her back here and so we had six months together and then she passed away and it was rough. I was still teaching and trying to figure out the caregiver thing and me being her only child up here and family in Atlanta, it was very, very, very difficult time but yeah, after that things really, things stopped, slow down is an understatement. Things stopped. I was not in a creative space for a long time.

Yeah, I mean, can't imagine. I'm really sorry about your mom. It just feels like the kind of thing where it must just take... I don't know, what did it take to get to climb out of that?

Shadra Strickland:
Well, why are you trying to make me cry at the beginning of this interview? Jordan, that's not what we're here for. It took time and every day still feels like I'm really going to start crying. It feels like a little bit of heartbreak every day and that doesn't go away.

Well, let's just talk about when things were good and you were younger and everybody was healthy, but when you were younger, I think I heard somewhere you were describing yourself under the table reading while they were talking.

Shadra Strickland:
Yeah, so during those times, because I would be at my grandmother's house in the afternoon, so my mom would come and we'd usually end up staying for dinner and they'd just end up watching television and gossiping at the kitchen table and she had this glass table and I would sit underneath it and draw and read and play while they were talking adult talk, but it was great. I was very, very well loved. I was a very well loved child and my mom was an English teacher at the beginning of her career and so I spent a lot of time reading and pretending I was smarter than her students, her high school students, which I was not, but grading papers, she taught me how to grade her test papers and...

Oh, that's amazing.

Shadra Strickland:
It was hilarious. Her students did not love knowing that her 10 year old daughter was grading their Shakespeare tests.

Like your little cursive, little person hand-

Shadra Strickland:
Exactly.

But what did you like to read when you were younger? Do you remember some since you were a picture book creator, what were some of the picture books that you remember that stick with you?

Shadra Strickland:
Yeah. One book, and I talk about this often is this book called Alexander and I always forget the illustrator and author's names, but it was a book, a picture book about a little boy, an only child who had an imaginary striped horse. The striped horse got blamed for all the things that he did and the striped horse was the one that got fussed at and all these things, and I just loved it. I think part of it was because the horse reminded me of the striped horse on, what's that gum? That is a popular stripe-

Oh yeah. Yikes, Stripes. Yeah. Fruit striped gum,

Shadra Strickland:
Fruit striped gum, so I think visually as silly as it sounds, I think visually I associated that horse with the gum, but I have a copy downstairs. I still love that book and I loved books like, How does weather work and Where does rain come from, What does the sun do? I loved informational books like that, little golden books. So those were the earliest and I think when Reading Rainbow came along, that's when I discovered Clouds by Pat Cummings and was just so blown away at what that book was. So those were my earliest. I think my adult picture books are the ones like The Snowy Day and Mufaro's Beautiful Daughters, but as a child, I remember those really simple how do things work books were my jam.

What kind of strikes me about those books and then you said little golden books or whatever, it's like some of those have a lot of detail when they're those... Because the illustrations usually in those books about the weather or something, they have a lot of... And they're usually very different one from the other.

Shadra Strickland:
Right, right but you have prolific picture book artists who did those books and still do. I think the Provensen's had gotten their start doing little golden books and then went on to win the Caldecott, so it's the same creative community making those really rich, detailed starter books and could get you into picture books.

Thinking back now as an artist, were there stylistic aspects of those illustrations that drew you in even then?

Shadra Strickland:
For the information book, I loved how clean they were, the design of them. There was usually a lot of white space. Not every page was fully illustrated. Alexander was that way too. It was little vignettes and then fuller pages and I'm thinking maybe that was an entryway in for me because I still like that kind of thing now, even though you don't see it in my picture books and for Clouds, I remember everything was so shiny the way that Pat illustrated that book. Everything was so, glistened and the main characters were black and that was really cool for me and it was so colorful. I just wanted to live in that world and the idea that there are these beings up there that make these clowns, I loved it. It was the wildest thing I had seen as a kid.

Yeah, that's like the one that sticks with you. LeVar Burton really open... I mean he really like-

Shadra Strickland:
Changed the game.

Did you still watch that, pretty much all the time?

Shadra Strickland:
Every time it came on, between Reading Rainbow and then Bob Ross, those were my two and I remember my mom always encouraged me as an artist. She saw that early on and I had a little easel and my cheap poster paints and I had my pad and would watch Bob Ross and try to paint along with him and get so frustrated because it never looked like what he was painting on the screen.

So she saw that in you at a very young age and really cultivated that, you had a love for drawing, for painting, just for art?

Shadra Strickland:
For art and mostly drawing and painting. I went to public school so there wasn't a whole lot of exposure to lots of different materials and techniques, but drawing and painting was easy. I had always had access to that and so because of that, she enrolled me into community art classes, not community art school, but there were community art centers would have portraiture class and that really changed everything. I remember my teacher's name was Kipp, I don't know his last name. It was Kipp and it was at the Callanwolde Art Center and he was the first person to teach me how to draw an eye that looked like a real eye and that opened all the doors.

"Come on rain," I say squinting into the endless heat. Mama lifts a listless vine and size, "Three weeks and not a drop," she says sagging over her parched plants. The sound of a heavy truck rumbles past, uneasy mama looks over to me. "Is that thunder Tessie?" She asks. Mama hates thunder. I climb up the steps for a better look. "It's just a truck, mama, "I say. I am sizzling like a hot potato. I ask Mama, "May I put on my bathing suit?" "Absolutely not," mama says frowning under her straw hat. "You'll burn all day out in the sun." Up and down the block, cats pant, heat waivers off tar patches in the broiling alleyway. Ms. Grace and Ms. Vera bend tending beds of drooping lupines. Not a sign of my friends Liz or Rosemary, not a peep from my pal Jackie Joyce. I stare out over rooftops, past chimneys into the way off distance and that's when I see it coming, clouds rolling in, gray clouds bunched and bulging under a purple sky. A creeper of hope circles around my bones, "Come on rain," I whisper.

Come on, Rain! is Newbery Award Winner, Karen Hess's, 1999 picture book about a young girl excitedly awaiting a rainstorm during the hot dry summer. The story, which reads almost like prose is complimented by full-page water-colored artwork. Given the theme of the story, the choice of watercolor is fitting. The warm colors bring the story to life, allowing the reader to nearly feel the Southern heat through the pages. It's a perfect example of the magic picture books hold. They aren't just a story with images as an afterthought, nor the other way around, but a collaboration of the senses to immerse readers in its world. Come on, rain successfully did that for Shadra.

Shadra Strickland:
Come on, rain is probably my favorite picture book of all time. The writing, that listless vine, that just the... Everything sizzles when it comes out of your mouth and it feels very Southern to me the way that she describes that heat, even though in the illustrations they're in a bigger city, but you get Southern cities, I just love it so much.

When did you read it?

Shadra Strickland:
I read Come on, rain probably in grad school. Yeah, in grad school and I remember copying some of the illustrations in black and white just to study the use of contrast. I had a really hard time balancing my lights and darks in my paintings and I love John Muth's work, all of it. It's just such a beautiful book to me.

Do you look at other illustrators when you're looking for your inspiration? I remember you talking about kind of looking to fine art.

Shadra Strickland:
Sure. I look at both. I mean, I look at everything. I mean, it's all the help I can get essentially, when I'm working on my art. I like everybody, please. Come on, rain lives in my studio. I have books all over the house and they rotate depending on what I'm working on. Kadir Nelson stays in my studio. Also, his earlier work specifically, I love Dancing in the Wings, I loved Big Jabe, the books that feel...

Just the two of us, that was [inaudible 00:15:51]

Shadra Strickland:
Yeah, Just the two of us veered a little bit, I think. Come on Jabe and Dancing in the Wings are my two absolute favorite and I think it's because it was so linear. There was so much draw. You could see the line and there was a lightness to it that I just absolutely loved and his in inventiveness when it came to characters, because before that I was so used to seeing John Steptoe and all the work that was very realistic. So in picture books specifically for African American kids, there wasn't a lot of character design and so his book was one of those that was like, oh-

Can you talk more about that character design?

Shadra Strickland:
I think it's changed so much now. Now it's not true. Now you have character design, meaning that the characters are completely invented by the artists and lightly referenced from real life as opposed to looking at work from me and Bird, I would say James Ransom and Eby Lewis, Jerry Pinkney, where they look like real people that you would see out on the street as opposed to the caricatures, not characters in the way that we think of caricatures in the '80s and '90s, but characterizations of real people.

And so he was one of the first that you saw, Kadir and Nelson was one of the first where you really felt that when you were looking through his-

Shadra Strickland:
Yeah, and his characters still felt like they felt alive, but you can see somewhat of a formula in the way that he would draw faces specifically and even the bodies felt constructed, but they still felt really flexible and movable and all that kind of stuff.

While Shadra's passion for art led her to a highly successful career as an illustrator, there was still a storyteller within her awaiting a debut. I've actually always loved Shadra's work and I even interviewed her in a series of Google Hangouts I hosted nearly 10 years ago but even then, she knew she wanted to author her own book too. It wasn't until 2023 with the release of Jump In! that Shadra took a monumental step writing and illustrating her own story. I asked her to walk us through what inspired her to take that leap.

Shadra Strickland:
The story came first and the story happened 10 years ago. I sold Jump In! of a... I always say a hundred years ago and it came from a commercial. I was watching a commercial and there were people jump roping and double touching and I was like, "Oh, that was so cool," and then I sat down and wrote this story in response to that and-

You wrote what's here right now, like you actually wrote that, most of that?

Shadra Strickland:
I wrote the whole thing.

You did that?

Shadra Strickland:
I wrote the whole... I sat down in like-

One sitting?

Shadra Strickland:
Yeah, it was one sitting. I sat down and wrote it because it was an exercise and I wasn't trying to write a story that I wanted to get published.

Man, you tricked. It's like you tricked yourself without knowing.

Shadra Strickland:
Exactly. I've written so many other stories that I was working, laboring over and Jump In! I just wrote and my agent kept a folder of all of our work and I tossed it in there and she immediately was like, "Where have you been hiding this?" And I think she sold it within a week. I had to do one revision. The editor that bought it was like, "Oh, can you add more types of plays?" At first I think it was just the rope and I was like, "Oh yeah, that makes sense," and I did. I was going to New York on the bus and sat down and added a few things, changed a few things, and we sold it the next day.

Next day. Oh, you're like, oh yeah, here, somebody's playing basketball, somebody's playing.

Shadra Strickland:
Yeah. I just went down the list of things that I like to play when I was a kid. And then what made sense in my head. So even when writing it, I see the illustrations. And so in the manuscript, I broke it into the page turn. So it would be one pace down, two, three, copyright, dedication, four, five. We see kids running out of a building. And then that first stanza. So when I was writing it, I was writing it and including art notes to myself and to whoever was going to hopefully purchase it.

I don't know what you call that, but it's not, it's like some people write with a cinematic view in mind, but you have the book in your head, you have the pictures in your head

Shadra Strickland:
For that one, yeah. It doesn't always work that way, but I think for most... I think for most writers, when they write the story, they see it unfolding and for illustrators-

Of course, but they can't see it in their own hand. They can see it and then they just hope that this person that covers the art, their illustrator or something...

Shadra Strickland:
Well it's interesting because some authors will try to include art notes and I have received manuscripts like that early in my career and I would be so offended, why are you trying to tell me what to do? Let me envision it myself.

You don't know about this.

Shadra Strickland:
Yeah. I got this but for my own, I was writing it to direct myself and just envisioning the whole thing and basically, that's also a way to help me with pacing to try and understand does this unfold over a short period of time, a day, what's happening around me?

I love in the book, and I was just wondering if you had this in your head, how some of the pages will, I don't know what it's called, but they fold out-

Shadra Strickland:
The gatefolds.

And so then it's this little surprise, but then sometimes they'll fold vertically or horizontal. So it's interactive and and it's surprising, was that part of your-

Shadra Strickland:
No. It was not. When I was making the dummy for the book, I tried to sketch it out in a regular 32 page format and it just didn't fit. That refrain, Jump In! specifically felt like an additional beat and it needed something else and that something else wasn't going to be more pages. I'm not a person that works with panels. I was thinking about this recently, oh, if I revise that, I wonder if I could have done this with panels and maybe I could, but I'd worked in design and I've seen books with gatefolds and I was just like, oh, this might be fun and so I made a black and white version of it, just sketches and made the whole book with the gatefolds opening and sent it to my editor and Mary Kate and she's like, "You were smart to do this because if you had just told us you wanted gatefolds, we would've been like, no."

Why, they don't want that, gatefolds?

Shadra Strickland:
It's expensive. It's expensive, but it worked for the book and for me, Jump In! it beckons you to play and I think for me, the gatefolds is that experience of the book asking you to play with it and discover and you know...

Yeah, it does feel very playful and is this so... Okay, first of all, when you were younger, is this sort of a representation of your memories of playing outside when you were younger, does it stem from that?

Shadra Strickland:
For sure. I was an only child, so that kid, the first kid in the book that yells "Jump In!," that's me. Like, please come and play, please?

Somebody.

Shadra Strickland:
Exactly. Please come to play with me and I grew up in apartments and you know, you go outside and you walk around until you find people to play with and at a certain time you could find a gang of kids outside riding their bikes and doing all these things and then at school we had recess and it was that everybody's on the playground and we're playing and bringing all of these types of plays in. So very much, very much my childhood.

Are there any characters who you illustrated who are also actual people that you kind of remember or people besides your dog, besides Lucky?

Shadra Strickland:
Lucky's the only-

Who's not your dog, I guess.

Shadra Strickland:
Lucky's the only real character. So Leroy is based on, loosely on my best friend's husband. We all went to high school together and his nickname is Bruce Leroy from The Last Dragon. So Leroy, that name definitely reflects him. My niece, his daughter, August is the character, I named the character Jackie, who was doing her homework and so she posed for me for that character, even though she doesn't look like her. Outside of that, most of them were versions of myself. There's a little girl with a broken arm, she has a cast on. I broke my arm twice as a kid and was still outside.

Really, how?

Shadra Strickland:
Oh man. The first time I was with my aunt and she had taken me to some friend's house and they had kids and the boys were chasing the girls through the house. I ran down the steps, slipped on the hangar and braced myself and ran into the wall. The second time I had my cast, I had just gotten my cast taken off and I'm outside playing in my roller skates. There's a little girl in roller skates and Jump In! also in my roller skates and as an only child, I am a show off a little bit and I was like, "Look, everybody look at me," and I did a cartwheel and fell over and broke my-

You did a cartwheel in roller skates?

Shadra Strickland:
I did and broke my arm but it was good that I did because the first setting wasn't correct and the doctor was like, "We would've had to re-break this," and I was like, "Oh, well the universe loves me because there's no way I was going to let you re break my arm."

Yeah and I don't know if that was your left or your right arm.

Shadra Strickland:
It was my right arm. My drawing arm

Yeah, I was going to say that are you right-handed?

Shadra Strickland:
I am right-handed.

Yeah. I mean know that could have been your whole life would've gone a different way.

Shadra Strickland:
Exactly.

Okay. What if it had broken, what do you think in an alternate universe is like the other Shadra Strickland blank?

Shadra Strickland:
I would've been like Beyonce. I would've been... Totally, would've been some attention seeking other creative. Absolutely.

I like it. That's definitely the best answer anyone's ever given to that question for me. Beyonce. Yeah, Shadra, it works.

Shadra Strickland:
She's a Virgo. I'm a Virgo. I mean, it makes sense.

Yeah. Similarities are like, yeah. Regular listeners might remember that another author illustrator, Grace Lynn was on The Reading Culture recently and Grace raised some red flags about the potential use of AI and picture books. The future of the technology is still unknown, but its advancements have sparked an ongoing debate about the ethics and humanity of art. Speaking to another artist, I was curious to hear Shadra's perspective on the issue.

Shadra Strickland:
AI is the thing that is stressful for artists and mainly because the people that have created this technology are sourcing artwork from artists without their permission to help people create new art and right now I think that it is spectacle right now, it's this new thing, "Ooh, look, I can make art," but if you look... And I've seen a lot of AI artists that make these really cold, beautiful things, but you can tell it's not from a real person.

So the issue with that is I think most of the general public or civilians are easily seduced by that, but people who know art are not, right and we were just talking about this at SCBWI where they talked about these robots actually writing also and what publishers are going to do to kind of catch that and not publish books made by robots and the easy answer is, well, I'm not going to publish something without talking to this person, without asking for other samples to try and make sure they're real but we also are very, very much at the beginning of this and don't know how it will grow and what it will grow into.

My hope is that the technology becomes useful for education and not a tool that kind of moves into this commercial space and takes jobs away from real artists. I don't know, it's a weird world. I mean, why couldn't we cure cancer or do something useful?

Why do you have help the kid write their English paper? Who is that helping.

Shadra Strickland:
Right. Right. So I don't know. The short answer is, I don't know. I'm also not paying too much attention. I'm going to keep making my work and so are the other real people and artists that are in the world. Maybe the robots can keep up, hopefully they can't.

Your work for Jump In! is so grounded in the human experience and it has this neighborhood setting that feels very alive and makes me think about the neighborhood libraries and schools that you've visited while promoting the book and I wonder, has that neighborhoody atmosphere that you created in the story, has that extended to your visits to schools?

Shadra Strickland:
So to Jump In! this tour is the first time I've actually had a loosely coined book tour where it's been like every weekend I'm doing something and I think now I'm like, oh yeah, I'm an author now. So the conversation is different where in some of these events they wouldn't have invited me just as the illustrator. I've had a ball. Jump In! is the most playful book that I've illustrated all of my other books with other people have been somewhat serious and so the conversation, I feel more like a teacher in that space when I'm talking to them, but this experience has been pretending to double Dutch and jumping up and down and really having a chance to play with kids and it's just the... I'm exhausted after it, but it's the best.

So y'all are actually jumping double Dutch during the visits?

Shadra Strickland:
We are. So I have?

How are you now at this stage in life, you still got it?

Shadra Strickland:
I'm good. Well, I only jump this much and let the kids do the rest. Yesterday I enlisted a teacher and she was on one end, I was on the other and we had our fake ropes and all the kids stood up and they double dutched in the fake ropes. So it was great. Nobody got hurt. I'm not going to get sued. It's a lot of fun.

Have you had any people, unexpected people jumping in your visits?

Shadra Strickland:
I had a teacher's aide yesterday because when the kids were jumping, she was jumping with them and I said, "Ms. Jones, I have a feeling you used to double this." She was like, "I sure did," and I said, "Can you come show us how you double Dutch and how you lift your knees?" And she came on in and did her high knee, high knee and the kids then mimic that. So it is big fun and I like to bring the adults in the room in as well as the kids to play.

I love that, Like Miss Mabel.

Shadra Strickland:
Yeah, like Miss Mabel.

I love her. She's my definite favorite character.

Shadra Strickland:
She's everybody's favorite, unexpectedly.

Because you know you want to be her. Is she anybody, is that what...

Shadra Strickland:
No.

No. Is that your grandma? No.

Shadra Strickland:
She would've been out there. She wouldn't have double Dutch but she would've been out there shaking. She absolutely would've been out there shaking her hips.

And your mom?

Shadra Strickland:
My mom would've tried. She would've tried. Oh yeah, she would and we would've had to tell her to sit down before she hurt herself but she would've have tried for sure and I didn't grow up double dutching. I grew up jumping rope, but double Dutch was always so intimidating and I was like, I don't want to get hit in the face with the ropes and all the things, but a lot of time jumping rope.

Yeah, that's good. It's the best exercise.

Shadra Strickland:
It is.

Okay. Now that you've done it, you've got Jump In! out there, people are loving it and you get to see all of these kids who adore it so much. Do you think you'll continue to write the stories that you illustrate or what do you have in mind for what's next in your career?

Shadra Strickland:
I've never had anything in mind other than I want to make books and the goal was always, I want to make at least one book a year and I think that's the speed that I can kind of manage right now. I'm working on the next two by other authors and I think there will always be a balance of the two with other authors. They're going to write stories that I can never think of. Never. It would just never even occur to me and so I like being able to engage and collaborate in that way. For my own work, it's fun, it's exciting. Jump, In! is the first, we'll see how it goes. I have two other manuscripts that I'm waiting on a contract for that I'm itching to do like now. So I'm definitely bitten by the bug but life is long. We'll see. I don't think I'll only be an author illustrator.

And agent. What else is in your...

Shadra Strickland:
And teacher.

And teacher. What are other things like dreams that you have for yourself?

Shadra Strickland:
Well I think when I say that, I mean I will always work with other people and collaborate in story. I'd like to write some longer format work, maybe some middle grade that really intimidates me and scares me because that feels like real writing as opposed to picture books, which is playwriting for me but I'm open. I like living spherically in lots of different directions and so we'll see. I'm thinking more about teaching and wondering if that part of my life needs to sunset so that I can focus more on my creative life. I don't think I'd ever leave teaching completely, but I think removing myself from full-time might be the way but I always joke, I'm like teaching is my Bruce Wayne and writing and illustrating is my Batman.

I love that. Seems like maybe you've thought about this based on your answer about what you would be in the movie of your life. Who is playing you? Have you thought about that? Have you thought about who in your biopic, is it Beyonce?

Shadra Strickland:
No. One of my friends teases me all the time because my only childness is very real and comes out and he's like, I just feel like you walk around with Shadra, Shadra, Shadra, Shadra, Shadra playing in your head all the time. I was like that is so mean and I can be very singularly minded and I live in my own world. So in that biopic it would be me. It would be me.

Why are we talking about somebody else playing me?

Shadra Strickland:
Who else would it be? It would be me.

Perfect answer. Thank you.

Shadra Strickland:
Sure.

Jump In! has got kids moving, it's got Shadra moving and now with her reading challenge Move It, she wants you to move even more.

Shadra Strickland:
My reading challenge is books that make you move, books that make you want to get up and shake it. So I have David Jumps In by Alan Woo, I Got The Rhythm, by Connie Schofield-Morrison. I love, One More Dino on the Floor by Kelly Starling Lyons, We All Play by Julie Flett, and then to bring us all down off of all that activity, You Are a Lion, which is yoga based, by Taeeun Yoo.

Yeah, I love that and also Jump In!

Shadra Strickland:
And of course, Jump In!

I'm thinking about Michelle Obama thinking all the kids jumping on the White House lawn. So this is the picture book version of Let's Move.

Shadra Strickland:
Exactly.

I like it. You can check out Shadra's Challenge and all of our author reading challenges at thereadingculturepod.com. Today's bean stack featured librarian is Jen Siderius, the media specialist at New Market Elementary School in Maryland. She shares a heartwarming story about the value of making different book formats available to students and families.

Jen Siderius:
One of my favorite moments in our media center happened about five years ago. It was when media centers and libraries really started promoting eBooks and recognizing the need for eBooks on a variety of different platforms and we were really working to build and expand our collection, not just to support students and teachers in the classroom, but also families at home would always have access to books no matter what kind of devices they had and I had a dad reach out to me and it confirmed to me that this was important and we needed to make sure that we were always budgeting and supporting E-book purchases.

He was in the Navy and at that time he was deployed and so he was across the United States, nowhere near his young children and he reached out to me to say that he really appreciated that we had an E-book collection available to him and his family because every night what he would do while he was deployed and able to, he would pull up an E-book and then his children would pull up that same E-book on their devices at home and he would read a bedtime story to them and he loved having it.

He said, "I know I could get a book. I know I could read a book over the phone, over FaceTime to them, but just knowing that we're both looking at the same pictures, the same text in real time, it made that bond stronger," and made him feel like he was being part of his children's life and contributing to their education and making this moment with them every night and I loved that.

This has been The Reading Culture and you've been listening to our conversation with Shadra Strickland. Again, I'm your host, Jordan Lloyd Bookey, and currently I'm reading Warrior Girl Unearthed by Angeline Boulley and, I have some questions for you by Rebecca MacKay. If you enjoyed today's show, please show some love and rate, subscribe and share The Reading Culture among your friends and networks. To learn more about how you can help grow your community's reading culture, check out all of our resources at beanstack.com and join us on social media at The Reading Culture Pod for some awesome giveaways and be sure to check out The Children's Book Podcast, the teacher and librarian Matthew Winner. It's a book podcast made for kids ages 6 to 12 that explores big ideas and the way that stories can help us feel seen, understood, and valued. You can find it wherever you listen to podcasts.

This episode was produced by Jackie Lamport and Lower Street Media and script edited by Josiah Lamberto Egan. We'll be back in two weeks with another episode. Thanks for joining and keep reading.

Shadra Strickland

Shadra Strickland

About this episode

Author Reading Challenge

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About this episode

Author Reading Challenge

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Learn More About Beanstack