People Magazine recently interviewed Clothilde Ewing about her book Stella Keeps the Sun Up (Simon & Schuster), illustrated by Lynne Gaines.
Ewing says she had a very clear vision for how she saw Stella that illustrator Lynn Gaines helped bring to life. “I wanted to make sure that Stella was a little black girl — complexion-wise, I wanted to make sure there wasn’t any ambiguity,” she says.
“I wanted Stella to have a beautiful brown skin tone and I wanted to make sure her hair looked like my daughter’s hair, that it had texture. And that she was colorful and exuded joy.” When she first saw Gaines’s drawings, “I almost cried,” she says. “It was so spot-on.”
Read the full interview here
Get the book here