Children’s literature event features authors with ties to Bellingham, Lynden
A group of nationally acclaimed children’s writers and illustrators — including two with Whatcom County ties — will be in Bellingham later this month as the Children’s Literature Conference returns from a year’s hiatus.
Village Books and Paper Dreams is hosting the 22nd conference, which started at Western Washington University. Over the past two decades, it has featured many of the top names in the “kid lit” genre, such as John Green, Kate DiCamillo and Kwame Alexander. Participants have included winners of the Newbery, Caldecott, Prinz, Coretta Scott King and other prestigious honors for works written for young readers.
Conference coordinator Kat Kayser told The Bellingham Herald that the event is an opportunity to hear how authors and illustrators get their ideas.
“It’s this little window into the background of children’s literature” for fans, writers and teachers, Kayser said in an interview.
This year’s conference panel includes Sophia Blackall, Natasha Tripplett, Phoebe Wahl and Eugene Yelchin. It’s scheduled for 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 28 at Sehome High School, 2700 Bill McDonald Parkway. Admission is $199, or $99 for students.
In addition to the conference, writers and illustrators featured in the event will be visiting select Whatcom County schools to give presentations, something they’ve done in previous years to help inspire students to read and write.
The conference is “such a gift” to Whatcom County, said Kristin Cleary, a librarian at Silver Beach and Birchwood elementary schools.
“When authors and illustrators have visited our schools, their books come to life and students see that books are created by real people and suddenly reading, writing and imagining felt possible in a whole new way. It has been incredibly powerful. This impact has lasted far beyond the visit — it plants seeds for lifelong readers and creators,” Cleary told The Herald in an email.
Among this year’s speakers:
- Yelchin is a returning presenter and winner of a 2021 Newbery Honor for “Breaking Stalin’s Nose,” the story of a young boy whose father is arrested as an enemy of the Soviet state. His most recent book is the graphic memoir “I Wish I Didn’t Have to Tell You This,” which is the sequel to “The Genius Under the Table.”
- Wahl, who lives in Bellingham, is an artist, write and illustrator. Her debut picture book “Sonya’s Chickens” won the Ezra Jack Keats Book Award for new illustrator, and her most recent work,” Little Witch Hazel” was a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Title and was named one of the Best Books of 2021 by BookPage, BookRiot, Booklist and the Chicago Public Library.
- Blackall, another returning presenter, is a writer and illustrator known for “Finding Winnie: The True Story of the World’s Most Famous Bear,” which won the Caldecott Medal for illustration in 2016.
- Tripplett, who grew up on Vancouver Island, is possibly best known for her 2024 book “Juneteenth Is.” But her picture book “The Blue Pickup,” also published in 2024, is based on a truck that was owned by her grandfather in Lynden.
Tripplett told The Herald about the real “Blue Pickup” in a phone call from her San Francisco Bay Area home.
“He was very, very handy — always fixing things. I loved to go into his workshop and imagine all the uses for (the tools),” Tripplett said. “I subconsciously started thinking of the truck as time capsule. It was a special time, very, very much a bonding time.”
She set the book in Jamaica, home of her birth family, but the focus of the story is factual, telling how a young girl grows to love learning how things work through a deep connection with her grandfather.
And the blue pickup? It was a 1990s Ford F-150 that you might have seen driving around Main Street. But now it’s in Northern California and Tripplett restored it after her grandfather died.
