Pluck a passage from the woods and you might almost think it wrote itself.
Children’s book author and poet Nikki Grimes strode to the podium and read passages from her forthcoming title, A Walk in the Woods (Neal Porter Books, September). The audience at the American Library Association’s 2023 Annual Conference and Exhibition on June 24 was rapt. The room was still, except for some rustling and verse, a forest all its own.
“Too few children’s books feature Black characters engaging with nature, and that was something we were both interested in changing,” Grimes said.
The “we” refers to her and the late Jerry Pinkney, renowned illustrator of more than 100 books, including the Caldecott Medal–winning The Lion and the Mouse. Grimes and Pinkney had been friends for years but hadn’t collaborated on a picture book until Pinkney’s wife Gloria suggested it shortly before the pandemic.
Grimes detailed the creative process and email correspondence between her and Pinkney during the COVID-19 shutdown. Pinkney would bring his camera with him on meditative walks in the woods near his studio in Croton-on-Hudson, New York. He shared images with Grimes, who now lives in Southern California, of the natural phenomena he already knew so well: great-horned owls, sugar maples, fungus on the barks of the highest trees.
“I started writing poems in response,” Grimes said, but she initially struggled with the thread that would tie her story together. Inspired by Chris Van Allsburg’s The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, she decided her book had to be a mystery.
“I’ve never written a mystery in my life,” Grimes said. “But when has that ever stopped me?”
Grimes also determined her story would be about a boy whose father died and left him a treasure map: “I wanted a strong emotional reason for my character to go into the woods.”
Grimes and Pinkney soon got to work on drafts and sketches. Then, the unthinkable happened. Grimes got a phone call on October 20, 2021—her birthday—informing her that Jerry Pinkney had died.
“I could never have guessed that life would so soon imitate art,” she said.
A Walk in the Woods was not lost, however. Gloria asked Jerry’s son, Brian Pinkney, an award-winning illustrator in his own right, if he would consider finishing Jerry’s drawings for the book.
“I said no. He was a master of detail, I could never do Jerry,” Brian said. “But my mother asked me do something. I always say yes when my mother asks me to do something.”
When Brian read Grimes’s story, he could hardly believe the plot.
“It was my story with my dad,” he said. “I remember going into those woods, and my dad would point out different flora and fauna to me.”
Brian was stuck on how he would finish illustrating the book, but then it came to him. “I need to bring in the color that’s missing,” he said. “I put on my hiking boots,” showing the audience that he was wearing them during his talk.
“This is my way of showing my love to my dad,” he closed. “By honoring him. By finishing his book.”
