MELISSA SWEET ACCEPTS THE GOLDEN KITE FOR ILLUSTRATION!!!

Our lovely and fantastic Melissa Sweet, author and illustrator of many award-winning picture books, is here accepting the Golden Kite for her illustrations of Peter Mark Roget's life and world in The Right Word: Roget and his Thesaurus.

The research for this book began not far from here in Santa Barbara, where Melissa got to see one of Roget's original word books in a private collection. Melissa has illustrated word-centric biographies before, but unlike being able to pull from the imagery evoked in the words of William Carlos Williams, Melissa had to figure out how to visualize Roget's lists of words. 

For the better part of two weeks, Melissa handlettered Roget's original word list in sepia and had a jolly old time doing it. 

Melissa got to handle original Roget pages
like these—without gloves!

Melissa thanks her publisher Eerdmans Books for Young Readers, her author Jen Bryant, and the SCBWI/Golden Kite committee.

"My hope with this book is that readers will be delighted and informed, but most importantly, always find the right word when they need it."