middle grade nonfiction

1. Happy September!! What better way to anticipate the best season of the year than with Heegyum Kim’s delicious art. The little girl and her animal friends are celebrating fall with pumpkin cupcakes and donuts, apple pie and carrot cake. Yes, please. 🙂

Originally from South Korea, Heegyum is a freelance illustrator and graphic designer currently based in NYC, where she lives with her husband and two corgis, Fry and Mandu.

She studied Communication Design at Pratt Institute and Ewha Women’s Institute in Seoul. After working as a graphic designer in the beauty industry for ten years, she decided to shift her focus to illustration. Her favorite subjects are animals and nature depicted in a whimsical, humorous, and graphic style. She likes to explore shapes and colors to show characters’ unique personalities, and typically works in gouache and colored pencil.

She recently published her first children’s picture book, Un Hiver Chez Bleuet (Michi, 2023). This project actually began during the pandemic, when she shared a drawing of a blue bear on Instagram (she’d always loved the color blue and often made pictures entirely in blue). Her followers loved it so much that she started a Blue the Bear series, which she made into a postcard book.

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When it comes to Simon and Garfunkel, three things stand out in my memory: hearing “Homeward Bound” for the first time in a soundproof studio, waiting hours for them to arrive at the airport, and attending their 1968 concert in Honolulu.

I was a big S&G fan back in the day, belonged to a fan club whose sole purpose was to meet every rock group that performed in Hawai’i. We haunted airports and hotel lobbies, camped out overnight to score concert tickets, and sometimes got to meet our idols up close and personal at special events.

The Simon and Garfunkel concert remains in the top 5 of all shows attended in my lifetime. It still stands up against today’s large-venue extravaganzas with the big screens, sophisticated sound systems and light shows. There was just something pure, pristine and utterly transformative about those two voices and acoustic guitar. No need for any high tech razzle dazzle when you have good songs and soul-stirring, transcendent harmony.

When Paul Met Artie: The Story of Simon and Garfunkel, a fab new picture book biography for middle grade readers by G. Neri and David Litchfield (Candlewick, 2018), opens with the famous Central Park reunion concert in September 1981.

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