Go Tell It: How James Baldwin Became a Writer – A Talk with Quartez Harris and Gordon C. James

Someone asked me recently to come up with a list of the 2025 children’s book releases that I’m already excited about. I’m currently typing up a nice, neat little list and guess what book is featured at the very top? This isn’t a cover reveal, it’s a friggin’ celebration today, so I have no problem with showing you. Your eyes? Feast ’em!

Is Go Tell It our first picture book bio of James Baldwin? Not at this point (though it was when it was written). But trust me when I say that this is one of those books you’ll be thinking about long after you put it down. Here’s the quick synopsis:

“Discover the story of young James Baldwin in this ode to the legendary writer and the power of the written word—with exquisite prose from acclaimed poet Quartez Harris, and breathtaking illustrations from New York Times bestselling creator and Caldecott Honoree Gordon C. James.

The first time Jimmy read a book the words clung to him like glitter…

Before James Baldwin was a celebrated novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and activist, he was a boy who fell in love with stories. Words opened up new worlds for young Jimmy, who read and wrote at every opportunity. He ultimately realized his dreams of becoming an author and giving voice to his community, and in doing so he showed the world the fullness of Black American life.

This picture book biography of an American icon is a poetic introduction to James Baldwin and celebration of the power of language. Additional biographical information and personal notes from the author and illustrator round out this stunning celebration of Baldwin’s life and work.”

Poet Quartez Harris was a Baldwin House fellow and named Ohio Poet of the Year for his book We Made It to School Alive, and his poetry has garnered numerous accolades. He spent many years as a second grade teacher in the Cleveland public school system. You know what that means? It means he knows how kids work and how to write for them. As for Gordon C. James, you’re familiar with his work. How do I know that? Because I know you probably saw a little title called Crown: Ode to a Fresh Cut and saw that killer art. This book? On par.

In fact, after reading Go Tell It I said to its publicist, “… it’s the Baldwin book here that’s extraordinary. This is a debut author?!?! Feels like she’s been honing her craft for years. Could I interview both Quartez and Gordon? This thing is outta this world.”

Turns out, I could.

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Betsy Bird: Quartez! Thank you so much for taking the time to answer some of my questions today! James Baldwin really hasn’t appeared in that many picture book bios for kids, inexplicably, until now. How did you get the idea for this book in the first place and what compelled you to write it?

Quartez Harris: Hey Betsy Bird, it’s a delight to be in conversation with you about my literary hero. So, back in the spring of 2021, I was on the phone with my dear friend and author, Alicia D. Williams, and I was sort of rambling on and on about my deeply felt love for Baldwin’s facility of language, his poetic mind (which felt in a lot of ways like how my own mind worked) and how he helped to clarify something within me.  And out of me meandering about Baldwin, she brought it to my attention that there were no picture books in tribute to his legacy. As you can imagine, this discovery was incredibly shocking. But it prompted me to search everywhere for a single children’s text that spelled out Baldwin. There was none. I mean, there was Your Dreams, Little One by Vashti Harrison, but in that picture book, Baldwin was featured among a cannon of black heroes. So, Alicia was correct; Baldwin was not fully represented in children’s literature. I decided right then that I was going to write a lyrical picture book detailing the life and legacy of James Baldwin for the minds of young readers.

When I sent my full-length manuscript to my agent back in Oct 2021, I was a second-grade teacher in Cleveland Public City Schools and had been for six years, so I was incredibly excited about the possibility of introducing children to this child of letters in classrooms across the country.  Also, this interesting thing happens when you ask people when they first discovered Baldwin; they usually point out that they discovered Baldwin later on in their lives. So, my inspiration also came from that. I wanted early readers to not have to wait until they got older to hear Baldwin’s voice in their heads or to peruse his story. If you think about it, Baldwin’s life is very much a story of childhood. So, I believe to prepare children to have a literary childhood, Baldwin is a good example of what it is like to read and write as a child.

BB: Fantastic answer. And, of course, it helps when that life is accompanied by stellar art. Gordon, a thousand thanks for also talking with me today. It’s always a treat to watch an incredible illustrator get paired with a text worthy of his skills. I’d say that’s precisely what we have here with GO TELL IT. How did you come to learn about this manuscript? And what made you want to work with it?

Gordon C. James: I love history. I’ve always had an interest in Baldwin. I’ve listened to his lectures and debates, but I really didn’t know very much about his life so I thought that this would be a unique opportunity to get to know more about this great creative.

BB: That’s awesome. Quartez, let’s talk a bit about some of the choices you made with this text. Your depiction of Jimmy’s stepfather is such an interesting study in nuance. When writing books for kids, people are very much inclined to paint people in black and white. You manage a bit of nuance to the man’s character that another author would eschew. It all seems tied up in Jimmy’s time preaching in his own church. Was this the intention from the start or did it come out naturally as you worked on the book?

Quartez: It was intentional because drawing on Jimmy’s experience as a 13-year-old preacher is crucial to understanding his contentious relationship with his stepfather. Jimmy’s decision to become a boy preacher in his stepfather’s church allowed him to resist his stepfather’s brutal anguish and power over him. In the pulpit, Jimmy had something to say and could, in a sense, confront his stepfather, who was a minister. Because Jimmy became a preacher, his stepfather couldn’t entirely diminish him. Jimmy had a voice, too, and his stepfather could not silence him on the pulpit. Among other things, Jimmy would use his experience in his stepfather’s church to speak, write, and work through social-political issues and racial prejudice.

BB: Piggybacking off of that, the element of religion and Jimmy’s relationship to it is, again, something that in the past might have been deemed too complex an issue for kids to understand. You break it down beautifully on the page. Why was it important to you to include this element of the man’s early life?

Quartez: It was important to me because Jimmy’s relationship to the Christian church was a deeply felt lived experience. It also felt very intimately familiar to me, as it reminded me of my own childhood in my father’s church. My father strongly imposed his religious beliefs on me and my siblings, making us go to church. When I read or listened to Jimmy discussing the complex topic of religion, I felt like he was giving me the gift of language to make sense of my personal relationship with the church. I also believe it’s important for children to learn about how religion influenced Jimmy’s thinking as well. It’s worth noting thatreligion was crucial to Jimmy’s development as a literary figure and his understanding of not only his stepfather but also the world. The Christian church shaped his writing, and he often drew from his religious upbringing and the sermon tradition, focusing on political and social transformation. Even though he openly critiqued the church as an entity, his time in the pulpit was central to his mixed genres. But it was really difficult to find a way to explain this aspect of Jimmy in a short amount of words and somehow make it accessible for children. But I did it in service of his legacy.

BB: Meanwhile, James, you had to bring all of this to life visually. Did you do each spread in sequence, or did you need to move around in the book?

James: I worked out of order.  I chose to start with the most detailed spreads and the cover early on so that I could go back to them and add more and more and more time and effort and emphasis on certain parts of the story.  I treat my book projects like fine art and starting with these “big”pages allows me to put the work in to achieve that goal.  

BB: Well and this is by no means your first picture book to feature historical figures. Still, one can’t help but think that James Baldwin in particular is an interesting physical subject to consider. He had such a distinctive look. Did you find that a help or a hindrance when rendering him in paint? 

James: I generally work with models that I hire.  I was fortunate to find two awesome young men and their families were willing to help me out with this book and they had a look that was relatively close to Baldwin’s.  Those families were were a great help and the look of both those young men was a great starting point for young James Baldwin.   

BB: Shoot. That’s fascinating. I’d love to know more about that but I also want to get back to the storytelling element. Quartez, let’s break down how you chose to tell this story. Some biographies go from birth to death while others circle around a pivotal moment in the subject’s life. You’ve opted for the latter, but was there a moment when you ever wanted to tell the birth-to-death version of Jimmy’s story?

Quartez; I actually knew at the start of the book that I didn’t want to give an account of Baldwin from birth to death. I wanted to start with Baldwin as an early reader because many people have a general knowledge of Jimmy the adult: Jimmy who went to Paris, Jimmy with arresting oratorical abilities, and Jimmy the poetic spokesperson during the civil rights movement. I felt like there wasn’t enough attention on his Harlem Childhood, though he would use details of his childhood as a thread through his autobiographical style of writing. I also wanted to focus a little bit more on Jimmy, the child, in part because he had a strong emotional awareness of children and a deep sense of compassion for them. He had the world of Harlem, which was difficult, but he also had this whole other world in books. Books were transformative for him early in life; he was an early reader. So it was also important that I started with the impact of language on young Jimmy and ended with his first book, a book he spent ten years writing.

BB: And how much of this story is the same from your very first draft? What did you change along the way? And what got left on the cutting room floor? And is there anything not in this book that you miss but that just didn’t fit?

Quartez: Conceptually, the first draft remained relatively the same, focusing on Jimmy’s love for words and his winding path toward writing his first book. Initially, the first draft was heavily lyrical, so I had to cut confusing images to ensure that the heart of Jimmy’s story came first. However, Baldwin used poetry to work out his prose, so I intentionally used visual language to detail his life in this picture book. This craft choice was important to me as a poet because I believed that a musical text would leave room for children to trust their imagination, allowing them to form their mental pictures of Baldwin.  Looking back, I wish I had included a spread about his time at the New York Liberal newspaper called PM, where he would be thrown books and tasked with writing reviews.

BB: Speaking of New York, that city gets a lovely cameo in the art. James, I’m a bit fascinated by the process it takes to render a famous figure recognizable as a child in something like a picture book biography. Plus you have to render a New York City from his past at the same time. What kind of visual research do you do when you have to make a book of this sort?

James: As far as the city, my father is from Harlem, born and raised raised across the river from the old Yankee Stadium.  I’ve spent an awful lot of there over the years.  A lot of the buildings that are still standing are older. The façades haven’t changed much.  I was able to use a combination of old family photos, some photos that are my own from being there, research and memory.   

BB: Quartez, getting the incredible Gordon C. James was a bit of a feather in your cap. Were you at all aware of his work before this book? How do you feel about the final product?

Quartez: I feel so lucky to have the opportunity to write a book as a tribute to Baldwin, and I also feel lucky to pair my words with the work of Gordon C. James, which has made the book all the more painterly. He is truly a fine artist. I was familiar with Gordon from my time as a teacher. I relied on his books to engage students for our interactive read-alouds and built lessons around his work. My students and I would read Crown: An Ode to the Fresh Cut over and over again. I also encouraged my son to use lines from I Am Every Good Thing as affirmations before he walked into his school.

In terms of the final product, this book feels like a great nostalgia. It gives the grittiness of Harlem, the texture encapsulates the climate at that time. It’s like when you open the book, you go back in time and see the things Jimmy would have seen and hear the things he would have heard. Not only did Gordon paint a book, but in some ways, he recreated the past. Jimmy would be very proud to see all the paint that went into his story. His contribution to his book will get kids to see all the many colors Jimmy came out of. I’m just honored that his paintbrush will make it possible for children to meet Jimmy.

BB: The end product couldn’t be more impressive. Finally, what else can we expect from the two of you? Do you have any other books for kids in the works? If not, what else is on your plate?

Quartez: I’m deep into editing a middle-grade novel. I feel like I’m teaching myself how to write again because the length of a novel is so long, and I’m a poet and we can finish a poem with a single line. 

Gordon: By the time this book comes out, I will have just wrapped up a book by Carol Boston Weatherford about Thurgood  Marshall and I will be working on my first book that I have written which is going to be a really really cute board book for our littlest readers. 

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If I haven’t made it clear already, I really like this book. I’d like to thank both Quartez and Gordon for taking the time to answer all my myriad questions today. Go Tell It: How James Baldwin Became a Writer is out January 7th, so you haven’t too long to wait. Thanks too to Victoria Stapleton, Margaret Hansen, and the team and Little, Brown for bringing this Q&A all together.

Filed under: Best Books, Best Books of 2025, Interviews