MANY STORIES, ONE NEW CANAAN: Meet four successful graphic novelists & authors

Join us as we celebrate the end of our Winter Reading Program with many voices that make up the books we love! We will be joined by four different authors who have all lived in and around Connecticut! We will spend an hour with our authors, asking questions and talking about how their voices are reflected in their works. We will finish out the day with a book signing! Elm Street books will be onsite selling books. Best for families with older elementary and middle schoolers.

When registering, please add a question you have for the authors, or email it to [email protected]. 

The authors who will join us are...

Jerry Craft is the New York Times bestselling and Newbery Medal winning author of the graphic novel New Kid, along with its companion books, Class Act and School Trip. Craft is also the creator of Mama’s Boyz, an award-winning comic strip which won the African American Literary Award five times. He is a cofounder of the Schomburg Center’s Annual Black Comic Book Festival. He received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts.

A third-generation Japanese American, Debbi Michiko Florence is the acclaimed author of more than 20 books for children and tweens. Her books have received starred reviews, JLG Selections, and inclusion on lists such as Amazon Best Books and the Chicago Public Library Best of the Best. She loves to write stories about friendship and family. Her middle grade novels include Sweet and Sour and Just Be Cool, Jenna Sakai. She is also the author of the award-winning Jasmine Toguchi chapter book series. A native Californian, Debbi now lives in Connecticut.

Veera Hiranandani is the award-winning author of several books for young people. Her most recent middle-grade novel, How to Find What You're Not Looking For, received the 2022 Sydney Taylor Book Award, the 2022 Jane Addams Book Award, and was a finalist for the 2022 National Jewish Book Award. It was also named a Best Children's Book of the Year by Amazon, Kirkus Reviews, Bank Street College, and Brightly. The Newbery Honor winning The Night Diary also received the 2019 Walter Dean Myers Honor Award, the 2018 Malka Penn Award for Human Rights in Children's Literature, and several other honors and state reading list awards. Veera is also the author of the chapter book series Phoebe G. Green. She earned her MFA in fiction writing at Sarah Lawrence College. A former book editor at Simon & Schuster, she's now a faculty member with the MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults program at The Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Ryan Maloney is an author, illustrator, and animator who creates picture books, graphic novels, and educational video content exploring creative tools, tutorials, and trends and runs an animation studio, Medialuv. Ryan has created animated videos and visuals for artists like Owl City, Asher Roth, Fancy featuring Ariana Grande and Meghan Trainor, Somo, and hundreds of brands in the Toy, Health, Beauty, PR, and Advertising Industries. Ryan is from Orchard Park, NY, graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in '05, and resides in New Canaan, CT. 

Adults interested in the art of storytelling are encouraged to join the Library in welcoming New York Times bestselling author David Grann, who will be speaking about his riveting nonfiction book The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder on Thursday, March 14 at 7 pm.

This program is made possible by a generous grant from the Horizon Foundation.