Can you believe we’re already about to enter the holiday season?

I’m participating in a blog tour that has a giveaway associated with it. While this post is sponsored by Nyasha Williams and Sidney Rose McCall, please know that all opinions are my own. 

Nyasha Williams grew up living intermittently between the United States and South Africa. As a kindergarten teacher, she was inspired to continue work as an author, creator, and activist after reading her first book to her class when one of her Black students told her that mermaids could not be Black. Williams kickstarted her first picture book, What’s the Commotion in the Ocean, starring a Black mermaid who spreads a message of marine conservation. She is the author of four picture books with Running Press Kids, including the bestselling I Affirm Me, and is the author of RP Studio’s Black Tarot, as well as a board book series with Harpercollins. You can learn more about her at her websites here and here or follow her on Instagram.

Sidney Rose McCall is an historian and community intellectual who combines her academic work with her activism. Though the pandemic saw her complete her Masters in Applied Social Science far from the classroom, she turned her eyes to the community, building a platform through Patreon where she continues to share decolonized history lessons and virtual discussions. She also joined the Association to Preserve the Eatonville Community, Inc. as a student-docent at the Zora Neale Hurston National Museum of Fine Arts and now serves as a member of their Academic Committee for the ZORA! Festival of the Arts and Humanities. Ms. McCall hopes to work alongside community bridge builders to bring integrative stories into our creative spaces of resilience and resistance. To learn more about her, check out her linktree or follow her on Instagram.

ONCE UPON A KWANZAA is a picture book that takes a deep dive into examining the traditions behind the holiday and Kwanzaa is a holiday with many traditions I honestly wasn’t familiar with. This book is an intriguing look at all of those traditions, what they mean and where they come from, that includes a great variety of people and lived experiences celebrating this holiday. There is even a glossary and pronunciation guide.

Welcome Nyasha and Sidney!

Me: For those who might not be familiar with your work, can you both give us a brief history of your writing journey? When did you start writing books for children? How has that brought you to this book?]

Nyasha: Writing was never really a forefront passion for me. It wasn’t something I had immense interest in growing up; While I did attend the occasional writing workshop, I had my eyes on other dreams. At one point I wanted to be an event coordinator, and I still hold onto the vision of one day opening a cooking school for kids (or maybe a cooking school in general!).

I’ve always had a lot of passions, and teaching was one of them. I taught for four years, two in Baltimore and two in Colorado and that’s actually what shifted me toward writing. When I was in Baltimore, I noticed the books in the curriculum and the ones available to my students didn’t reflect who was sitting in the classroom. That didn’t feel right in my body. I spoke with fellow teachers, and while they agreed, many of them didn’t have the capacity to take on that kind of work.

I didn’t even know what a manuscript was at the time, but I felt called to do something, so I started writing. That’s how my first book, What’s the Commotion in the Ocean?, was born. I self-published it, and since then I’ve gone on to publish 14 projects, traditionally published. My work-in-progress now spans picture books, graphic novels, middle grade, YA, even a screenplay, alongside my divination tools like my (tarot) decks. Some of those bigger projects take more time to unfold, but I’m grateful for all the ways my writing keeps expanding. And now, with Once Upon a Kwanzaa, which released on September 30, 2025, I feel like I’ve added a piece of work to the world that both honors my journey and contributes to the traditions we hold in community.

Sidney: While I have crafted stories and songs since before I could write full sentences, my pathway into authorship was a winding road of different creative outlets. Writing plays for school competitions, directing theater productions, attending creative workshops for poetry and nonfiction all fed into my rich interior life and allowed me to deepen my skills in communal settings. Still, I struggled to push those stories out into the world, preferring to keep them tucked away in journals or floating in a region of my mind.

It wasn’t until I arrived in Historic Eatonville – the oldest self-governing Black town in the United States and the hometown of Harlem Renaissance anthropologist and author Zora Neale Hurston – that my personal practice as a budding scholar transformed into an act of recovering history and becoming a creative deeply rooted in the communal ritual of “return.” That work, both the personal and professional, wove together into a sojourn to a past that presses upon the many shared recipes, memories, technologies, magic, potentials, and possibilities that flood our shared histories.

As an intern-turned-museum interpreter at the Hurston Museum, one of the programs I helped put together was a “Kwanzaa with Zora” series wherein different creatives, land stewards, and thinkers from across the Black Diaspora gathered [virtually] to share how Kwanzaa’s teachings and principles resonated with their work and the legacy of the author of Their Eyes Were Watching God. This program brought me back into communion with the wintering holiday that my own family once celebrated annually. That program, coupled with my own emerging scholarship on Black ecology — the memories and relationships between water, the land, plants, and Black folks who live with them — pushed me to think of Kwanzaa as an extension of our living environment and my own personal journey. Kwanzaa became the centerfold of my ethos as a scholar and author: we belong to that past just as much as we belong to the many futures we have yet to unfold and form.

Me: How did you two ladies come to work together on this project? Who came up with the idea to approach Kwanzaa like this (or was it a collaborative idea)?

Nyasha: This project was really born out of collaboration. Both of us had been holding Kwanzaa close in our lives and creative practices, and we felt the gap when it came to picture books that celebrated it in a way that felt alive, relevant, and true to community. When we started talking, it wasn’t so much that one of us had the idea and the other joined in, it was more like we were each carrying pieces of the same vision, and when we came together those pieces clicked into place.

We also recognized the publishing gap. Most of the Kwanzaa books that exist today came out in the 90s, which means there’s been a long silence in terms of new stories, especially picture books. And compared to the abundance of books centering Christian holidays, there’s still very little that uplifts Kwanzaa in children’s literature. So when we pitched Once Upon a Kwanzaa to Running Press Kids, they immediately felt the urgency and importance that it didn’t even feel like a choice to them. And even beyond this book, Sidney and I dream of creating a whole series, similar like the Little Golden Books, where each one focuses on an individual principle. Families could sit with one book each night of the holiday, and also return to them throughout the year, weaving Kwanzaa’s lessons into daily life.

Sidney: Working on Once Upon a Kwanzaa  was a collaboration in the truest sense of the word. Following the federal recognition of the Juneteenth holiday (celebrated on June 19 to honor the emancipation of Black Texans held in bondage two years after the Proclamation), Nyasha and I began dreaming of the many possibilities and potentials held by cultural holidays. Just as Juneteenth offered people lessons on the histories of slavery, abolition, and freedom, Kwanzaa held the possibility of teaching classrooms and communities how to build up everyday principles and practices rooted in self-discovery, restorative learning, and collective joy and justice. For us, Kwanzaa became more than a holiday. Kwanzaa transformed into an everyday thing — a portal to the past, and a promise for the future.

Me: Would you recommend working as a team to write a picture book?

Nyasha: I’ve been blessed to co-author on four projects so far: The South African Alphabet of Affirmations with 11 other authors, Elemental Alchemist: The Oracle Deck and its guided journal with my sister, Grace Banda, Saturday Magic: A Hoodoo Story with my Mother-in-Love, Kenda Bell, and now Once Upon a Kwanzaa with Sidney Rose McCall. I love collaborating. It really lights me up. Honestly, every book is a collaboration if you think about it, because you’re always creating alongside the illustrator.

But true co-writing brings something unique. It allows different lenses, voices, and visions to melt together into something new, something I never could have created on my own. That blend is beautiful to me. Of course, collaboration isn’t always seamless. The hardest moments come when communication breaks down. If people aren’t being open and transparent about where they are, or if harm happens and isn’t acknowledged, that’s when the flow gets blocked. But I also believe repair and restorative practices make it possible to keep moving forward. And I’ve had both experiences, times when a project shifted and we had to part ways, and times when the collaboration blossomed into something magical. At the end of the day, co-writing is about honoring the season of the work and trusting the process. For me, it’s always a big “yes,” when Ancestrally aligned because I know that when we come together, each of us sees things the other doesn’t and that’s what makes the final creation so powerful.

Sidney: I truly believe crafting works and wonders for children is one of the greatest experiences a creative can manifest. Perhaps this is the theater kid in me, but, in my mind’s eye, collaboration requires a level of communication that resembles a musical. You have to understand both your role and the roles of your other “scene partners” as you come together to move and materialize words and illustrations on the page. You must work together to bring forth something that you could never have created alone. In one sense, to collaborate is to steep yourself in the principles and practices of Kwanzaa, as you must recognize your place in a much larger, more colorful picture book.

Me: There are so many facts and facets of history that you have included in this story. Can you talk a little bit about your research? Were there any surprises for you? Did you learn anything new that you didn’t know before?

Nyasha: Yes, I think whenever you do research, whether you’re already in the practice or not, you always end up learning more. For me, I deepened my understanding of the origins of Kwanzaa, and I also found that as I was researching and talking about it, more voices and resources started coming into my feed and into my awareness. That helped me learn from different communities about how they embody and practice Kwanzaa in their own ways.

One welcoming learning for me was realizing just how many different ways families and communities embody Kwanzaa. There isn’t one “right” way; it’s very alive and adaptive. That affirmed for me that Kwanzaa is a living tradition, something that continues to grow and expand as we do.

Another big piece of research for this book was around quilting, which is a major visual theme in Once Upon a Kwanzaa. You can see it on the cover and woven into the illustrations. We wanted to honor the history, tradition, and magic of quilting as both an art form and as a way messages were historically carried, especially in the Underground Railroad, when certain quilt patterns were used as codes to help guide our people toward freedom. That layer of history brought so much richness to the story, and it reminded me that there’s always room to grow and to evolve in how honor our traditions.

Sidney: While we use the word “history” to describe our own views of the times lost and long gone, the past itself extends beyond our vision. What I mean is that “history” exists as a constructed chronicle of events, timelines, dates, and endings, while the past pushes us to consider how recipes, food, memories, songs, folklore, gathering places, gardens, plants, and even water shaped the geographies of the past and their continuing afterlives. Unfortunately these deeper textures of history are rendered invisible by the grand narratives and national holidays saturating our public spaces. My work as a historian has helped nurture a deep appreciation for the importance of community storytelling and pushed me to craft narratives that reflect not only the present, but also brings us back into communion with the worlds of yesterday and tomorrow. Once Upon a Kwanzaa encourages young and grown readers to reimagine their nature (and those around them) through seven principles that, like roots, have infinite routes and pathways to uncover and restore.

Me: Why did you want to share this celebration as a book with young readers? What made you want to include so many different aspects and details of Kwanzaa, instead of just telling a fictional story? 

Nyasha: I move between fictional tales and high-concept stories, but with this book, it felt especially important to focus on the depth and details of Kwanzaa. Right now, there’s still such a lack of literature around the holiday, and a lot of misunderstanding, many people don’t even realize that Kwanzaa is a cultural celebration, not a religious one. We wanted to offer young readers, families, and classrooms a grounding resource that really explains the holiday: what it is, how it’s practiced, and why it matters.

To me, it’s like this, if people knew nothing about Christmas, it would feel strange to only share fictional tales about it before ever teaching what the holiday even is. Once there’s a wider understanding of Kwanzaa’s principles and practices, I absolutely see space for more fictional stories rooted in it, and I’d love to help bring those forth. But right now, it felt essential to create a book that could meet this moment of learning and reclamation, offering clarity and celebration at the same time.

Sidney: In a world increasingly flooded with calls to cement narratives that ban, segregate, bury, and erase the histories of people across colors and cultures, stories Once Upon a Kwanzaa are more important than ever. As a young Black bookworm with a near insatiable appetite for reading, I rarely felt the urgency to see another Black girl in the stories I read at school because the adults in my beloved community filled my childhood bookshelf with illustrated works written and dreamed up by Black writers, visionaries, and illustrators. Alongside that melanated collection, my shelf held classics and comic books, plays and poetry, world mythologies, far away galaxies, and magic tree houses. The adults around me (especially my fourth grade teacher Ms. Ryan) made sure that I never felt invisible in my everyday life or the stories I loved. They taught me how to appreciate myself and appreciate those who were different and diverse, to the point where I did not have to see myself on the page to feel seen.

What many folks often miss in children’s storytelling (and even young adult writings) is that these works have the power and potential to help shape our systems of reality (or worldviews). If young readers explore stories and shows where only certain groups or people are centered or celebrated, they will come to view those left off the page or pushed to the margins of the story as invisible. If something or someone is rendered invisible, do they actually exist? Are their stories and struggles just make-believe? Are they worthy of love or empathy? Do their sorrows, joys, and lives even matter? Invisibility not only impacts the kids who do not see themselves on the page in these stories, but indirectly signals to children and grown folks to be afraid and weary of anything and anyone that once only existed in the margins of the page. By reinforcing “otherness” rather than “diversity” we risk raising generations of young folks more willing to self-segregate and censor curiosity, creativity, and community.

But Kwanzaa encourages all of us to sojourn and search for our communities, both past and future – and just as the future belongs to the children of tomorrow, the past is theirs to recover, to remember, to reimagine, and to reclaim.

Me: The illustrations by Sawyer Cloud are amazing. I love the diversity of stories that are carried throughout the book and I laughed when I saw the inclusion of two previously illustrated books of your’s Nyasha. Any favorite illustrations? Any surprises?

Nyasha: Sawyer’s art really brought this story to life in such a vibrant way. One of the illustrations that stands out most to me is the beach scene, where families are gathered at the shore and children are leaving offerings in the ocean. It’s such a beautiful and tender moment of honoring, and it really captures the spirit of Kwanzaa as something deeply rooted in connection, to Ancestors, to nature, to each other. Another illustration that moved me was of the Gullah Geechee family, where you see the Ancestors watching over them in the clouds. That layering of presence, past and present, felt so powerful to me.

I’ve also loved working with Sawyer! This is actually the third book we’ve collaborated on together. One of the things I really appreciate about them is how they approach projects with such openness and respect. Sawyer is Black and part of the diaspora, but they are not African American, so some concepts we’ve explored together, like Hoodoo in Saturday Magic or Kwanzaa in this book, were completely new to them. That meant I needed to give very detailed art notes, sometimes breaking down cultural and spiritual nuances, and they honored that process with so much care. They trusted me in my knowledge, my practice, and my vision, while bringing their own artistry to make it flourish visually.

And then, of course, there are the sweet surprises, like the Easter eggs Sawyer tucked in. If you look closely, you’ll see little nods to our other collaborations, including book covers being handed out on one of the pages. That made me smile, because it felt like such a full-circle moment of community and ongoing collaboration.

Sidney: Bringing Sawyer into the fold of Kwanzaa felt like working on a communal quilt.  Even with the extensive character notes, vision boards, textile swatches, and cultural backgrounds we swapped like digital recipes, the care and consideration she showed in her illustrations shined through in the individual kids, families, and communities pressed on the page. Her eye for color and her commitment to creating characters that were both individual and ensemble, kin and community, past and future, truly transformed the narrative into a quilted tapestry.

Me: What advice for other aspiring picture book writers would you each give?

Nyasha: I’d say first, don’t feel like you have to “know it all” before you start. I didn’t know what a manuscript even was when I first began writing. You don’t need to wait until you’re an expert. You just need to begin.

At the same time, understand that storytelling carries responsibility. Children’s literature isn’t just entertainment, it’s shaping how kids see themselves, their communities, and the wider world. The words and images we put out matter, and we have to take that seriously when we create.

Collaboration is another huge piece. Writing can feel solitary, but children’s books are always a collective effort, whether with co-authors, illustrators, editors, or community members who inspire and inform the work. I love co-writing and co-creating because it allows multiple perspectives to come together, and that blending always creates something richer than I could on my own.

Finally, be intentional about who you’re writing for. Don’t try to write for everyone. When you’re clear about your audience, the work is more authentic and more impactful. And within that, remember the difference between visibility and true representation. Visibility is simply showing that a community exists on the page. True representation means honoring their fullness, their culture, history, voices, and humanity. That’s the deeper work, and it’s what children deserve.

Sidney: Do not wait for the perfect story to begin writing. Your story does not have to be exceptional or revolutionary to be worthy of being told. Often the most simple stories are the ones that resonate the loudest with us. Allow your story time to breathe and grow beyond your original vision. Be they fictional, ancestral, or inspired by real people across the futurepast, allow your characters to speak to you and listen. Learn from them and give them the same respect and space that we should all grant to our young readers and dreamers.

And keep reading! Great artists and scholars alike look and learn from the works of others. Find and nurture writing groups to help sharpen your words and ground your ideas. While reading can exist as a solitary activity, writing has the power and potential to flourish in community (like a garden)!

That is great advice. It was delight to talk with both of you today. Thank you for stopping by my blog.

But wait, dear readers! There’s more! While this is a blog tour, there is also a monumental giveaway happening. You can enter for the chance to win one of five hardcover copies of Once Upon a Kwanzaa! One grand prize winner will receive the book plus a complete Kwanzaa Celebration Kit—featuring a Kwanzaa Advent, Kinara, and ceremonial candles—to honor your family’s heritage and create meaningful traditions. You can enter the giveaway here! Good luck!

And if you want to read more of the blog tour, be sure to check out these other blogs!