Cultural Heartbeats: Adventures with Award-Winning Author Ismée Williams

Ismée Williams is the award-winning author of the young adult novels Water in May and This Train Is Being Held, which won an International Latino Book Award for Best Young Adult Romance, and a coeditor of the anthology Boundless: Twenty Voices Celebrating Multicultural and Multiracial Identities.

Her debut picture book, Abuelo, the Sea, and Me, is available for pre-order now. Coming in May 2024,  Abuelo, the Sea, and Me is a tender, heartwarming picture book that vividly explores intergenerational connections, family history, and the immigrant experience.

Ismée has been an invited speaker at The Virginia Festival of the Book, The Miami Book Fair, The NYC Teen Author Festival, The Southern Kentucky Book Festival, The Texas Book Fesival and The Bronx Book Festival among others. Ismée is a co-founder of the Latinx Kidlit Book Festival as well as a pediatric cardiologist in New York City where she lives with her family. She is the daughter of a Cuban immigrant and grew up listening to her abuelo’s bedtime stories. Follow her on X  and IG @IsmeeWilliams and her website: ismeewilliams.com.

The Latinx KidLit Book Festival was created in 2020 during the COVID pandemic by members of Las Musas Books. Their aim was to connect Latinx authors and illustrators with readers and educators in classrooms around the globe. Since then, and with the help of countless volunteers, the festival has continued to foster a love of story and literacy as well as increase empathy and conversation among educators, students, and book lovers while uplifting the voices of Latinx kidlit book creators. https://www.latinxkidlitbookfestival.com/

Transcript

Speaker 1 0:01

Wonder Curiosity Connection. Where will your adventures take you? I'm Dr Diane, and thank you for joining me on today's episode of Adventures in Learning. So welcome to the Adventures in Learning podcast. I'm your host, Dr Diane, and today you are in for a real treat. We have a guest with us who is a cardiologist, an author and somebody who organizes one of the most amazing book festivals out there. So welcome to the show. I'm so excited for you to get to meet Ysme.

Speaker 2 0:42

Williams, thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Speaker 1 0:46

So I want to start with a picture book that is coming out. Can you tell us a little bit about the brand new book and what we should be looking for?

How Cuban heritage influences her writing

Speaker 2 0:54

Oh, I'd love to. It is called Abuela of the Sienmé. This is my debut picture book, so I have published in the Young Adults Space before. This is my first foray into the picture book world, but I'm very excited about it. The book is about a young girl who bonds with her grandfather while going to the beach. Over the course of different seasons she learns about her grandfather's past because typically he's a little bit closed off and not very forthcoming with his memories, but when he's at the beach he's relaxed. He remembers his life back in Cuba. It is based off of my own experience with my own abuelito, so it's very special.

Speaker 1 1:40

That's what I was going to ask is I understand that you're the daughter of a Cuban immigrant. How has that colored your writing, both your picture book and your young adult books?

Speaker 2 1:51

I would say that my mother was born in Havana. My father was born in New Jersey. So if anything, I feel like my multicultural upbringing has really colored my perspective on life in general and especially while writing. My most recent young adult is a collection of anthologies about that multicultural experience. In some ways, I think the experience of being a young person and growing into your own identity often feels a little like you feel a little bit out of place and like do I belong or where do I belong? The experience of being from different cultures and not feeling like you fit in with either, because you're not enough of either and what space is there for me? It almost heightens that experience. So I definitely heavily leaned into that with all of my young adult novels, but at the same time pulling in a lot of the cultural details of my mother's heritage, because it's sort of what I dig around.

Speaker 1 3:03

That makes so much sense and I'm going to back up for just a minute and ask you a question I'd like to ask all of the guests, which is tell us about your adventures in learning. I mean, you're a cardiologist.

Speaker 2 3:15

You're an author.

Speaker 1 3:16

How did you get to where you are today?

Speaker 2 3:19

So I would say I did not take the traditional book publishing route. I wasn't the person who, from the time I was reading books, I said I want to write a book. I loved reading books and I was fortunate enough to go to a small liberal arts college called Amherst College and I knew I wanted to be a doctor because my mother was a doctor and my abuelito was a doctor and I saw them both struggle to become doctors. My grandfather had to re-certify as an obstetrician in this country, because you can't just come from another country and start practicing in this country. So he had to redo his residency and he did that at a very old age and my mother didn't go to medical school until she was 30, after she'd had both me and my little brother, and she didn't get into medical school right away because she was told to apply to the nursing school because she was a woman. So that's how old I am and those experiences shaped me and I said I want to be a doctor. I want to be a doctor, but I loved books and I love history. So I actually made it in history in college and in pre-med and that experience it was wonderful and I loved everything I learned in medical school and I loved everything I learned in medical school, but that college experience of doing a little bit of everything and being well-versed in lots of different things, I think it really enabled me to have Confidence that I could become a writer.

Speaker 2 4:48

So I decided I wanted to write a book when I was pregnant with my third child and I felt very thankful to a book that I read while I was on bed rest or Sort of making me feel these deep emotions and breaking down this wall I had built to contain my emotions so that I could survive pediatric residency where, unfortunately, sometimes your patients don't do well and sometimes your patients die, and I had a really tough time with that in the beginning. So I was very protective of my emotions. And then I read this book and of course I was pregnant and very hormonal, but you know I felt like the book punched the wall through that, punched a hole through that wall, and yeah, so I then I thought, oh, it's a superpower to be able to write something that influences someone's emotions and so I thought, let me try that and my first young adult novel was published seven years later. It did take a long time.

Culture, Cardiology, and Diverse Children's Literature

Speaker 2 5:43

That's another thing, I feel like my education prepared me to keep going right, because it takes a very long time to be a doctor and the, you know, the ultimate End product was worth all the work. And I would say the same for being an author. You know, if you want to, if you want to be an author, if you want to write, just keep, keep writing, keep writing. There's definitely a lot of people are gonna give you a lot of rejection, but if you keep going, the chances are much higher that you'll succeed absolutely.

Speaker 1 6:13

And you, you clearly have brought that love of books and the love of Culture and the love of medicine as well, from what I understand, into your books. How have you managed to sort of bring all of those things together?

Speaker 2 6:30

Well, I've touched on on different elements in my different books. My first book Relyed heavily on my experience as the pediatric cardiologist practicing in Washington Heights at Columbia University Medical Center. It's called water in May and it's about a 15 year old Dominican American girl who wants more than anything to have a baby so someone in her family will finally love her for poppies and shale. Her mother, who is white, left her with her Grandmother, her abuelita and and her grandmother's sort of resentful about having to raise another child, and so this young woman is left on her own. So she's very excited to by the prospect of having this little baby. Who's gonna love her? And then the doctors tell her the baby has half a heart and so it's it.

Speaker 2 7:15

It's Definitely emotional, like if you want to cry, and the story, the story say so. My best friend got engaged in Paris and she read the book on the flight home from Paris and was falling and her husband to this day is like angry when he had just proposed and she was like this book is so amazing. But that was my goal to make readers feel deep emotion.

Speaker 1 7:43

So I think that's wonderful and I get the sense that that's going to be the same case with your picture book. That I designed to touch on emotions as you're exploring seasons and memories.

Speaker 2 7:57

I hope so. Yes, and you know it's about. You know those intergenerational connections that I think are so important, no matter what culture you're from.

Speaker 1 8:06

I think that sounds amazing, and when is the book coming out?

Latinx Kidlit Book Festival

Speaker 2 8:10

It's coming out May 21st of 2024. If anybody's interested in pre-ordering, you can find it at any bookstore or it's from McMillan, so you can go to the McMillan website and they have a whole list of options and you can order it just right from your computer Sounds awesome.

Speaker 1 8:26

So let's talk about the Latinx Book Festival. What inspired that? How long has it been going? Give us all the information Sure.

Speaker 2 8:36

So the Latinx Kiblet Book Festival was founded in 2020, in the summer, in the height of the pandemic, by myself and two other dear friends who are also Latinx authors. We all had books come out right before the lockdown and we all came to the table with different concerns. So the person who thought of the idea, maidec Cuevas, was very concerned about the loss of opportunities for authors to connect with the readers. I was very concerned about the students who were going to face the potential shortcomings of virtual schooling and not being able to go into school and see an adult and be a firm. And then Alex Villesante, who is the third co-founder, was also concerned about the educators and the stress that was going to be placed on them, and so we created this virtual book festival that is geared towards pre-K through 12th grade and we have content for all students, not just Latinx students, and we try to curate the content so it's very easy to stream into the classroom, into the library, and we record all of our content, so it is actually on YouTube. We have four years of content. We're entering our fifth year now and some of the content you can look at by age level, some of it is cracked based. So we just recently last year had a wonderful session about writing in verse. We have one about how to write a graphic novel. We have one about using your own experience to inform your writing.

Speaker 2 10:20

We also have really very cute illustrator draw-offs. Those are very popular across all age ranges and some of those are actually in Espanol, so they're great also for Spanish language classes, because you have three illustrators and a moderator and they take prompts from the audience, and so a teacher will say hi, I'm a third grade teacher from San Francisco and Daniel wants to see a squirrel riding a skateboard while eating an ice cream cone. And all the illustrators are like Okay, daniel, this one's for you. And then they start drawing and it's very entertaining. And again, if it's in Spanish, it's fantastic if you're learning Spanish, because they're drawing what they're saying. We have a lot of resources too. On our website. We have a database. So if you're looking for a Latinx book featuring a Latinx character or written by a Latinx author, check out the database. Everything that we do is free. It is a 501c3.

Speaker 1 11:16

And what is the website?

Speaker 2 11:18

It is latinxkilliphookfestivalcom. So definitely a very long name.

Speaker 1 11:25

And if people want to support the work that you're doing, do they go to the website? How can they support making sure that they?

Speaker 2 11:32

can. So on the website, we do take donations. We just finished off an auction a writerly auction for people who were pre-published or interested in being published. We also accept volunteers, and so also, if you're an educator and this is something of interest to you, we'd love to come to your school. We'd love to talk to you. Please shoot us an email. You can find it on the contact form.

Speaker 2 11:55

We do book giveaways. We're giving away author visits to these to schools as well. We have a school visit fund and we're trying to get publishers to donate books. So to date, we've donated over 7,000 books to schools across the country and again, that's due to the gracious donations from all of the publishers who are also very passionate about our mission, which is to uplift the voices of these Latinx Kibla book creators, so authors and illustrators, but also to make sure that these stories reach all students, because it's really important for Latinx students to see themselves as the heroes of their own stories, that they can find the cure for the pandemic and slay the dragon. But it's also important for their best friend or for students who've never met a Latinx person to see what the Latinx experience is and to recognize that all the shared human experiences right. So we're about connection. You know, at this time I think it's so important. We need to foster that in our young people.

Speaker 1 12:58

Well, it feels like you all have really taken that concept of windows and mirrors and made it real in a way that it's relevant to all students and all classrooms and accessible, and I think that's just amazing. I'm excited.

Speaker 2 13:15

That is our hope.

Speaker 1 13:18

So what would be sort of your dreams for seeing this grow?

Speaker 2 13:22

Oh, my goodness, my dreams would be that we continue to expand because there's just so much need. We are in our second year of offering the author school visits and the first year we had donations from Penguin, Random House and SCBWI. This year we're getting donations from other publishers. They're stepping forward to actually fund it so we can pay the authors to actually go into the classrooms and we're looking to initiate in-person school visits as well. But there's just so much need. You know we only were able to do 25 visits the first year and we had over 100 applications and reading the application.

Speaker 2 14:03

We asked the educators, their educators, who were responding and they have to justify why they want one or why they need an author to come. And it honestly brought tears to my eye. All of these schools and they say that they don't have a library. They haven't had a library since the pandemic. They don't have books. They've never had an author visit because they're in a rural area and nobody can come to them. Students don't have books and the parents can't even take them to the library because the parents are overwhelmed. It's very touching. I'm sure everybody who's listening to this is very invested in education for young people and everybody understands the importance of literacy in general and the power of story, the power of books, and so my dream is just that we grow bigger and bigger and we can help as many people who ask for help, because right now it's really hard to have to select who gets these free you know events because we don't have enough resources at the moment to give them to everyone.

Speaker 1 15:05

That makes so much sense to me. So, folks, I will drop the website in the show notes. Make sure you go and take a look and support. I'll also drop your personal, your author website in as well so you can check out the books. But I want to ask a couple of other questions. What were your favorite books growing up?

Speaker 2 15:26

Oh, my goodness. So the question is, how old am I? Because, like in my, in my heart, like I remember hearing this at, I think, an SCBWI conference at some point, you know, because some writers for children write young adults, some do middle grades, some do picture book, I feel and they say, what is, what is your perspective? In your heart, I feel like I'm always a 16 year old girl. So I feel like my favorite books, growing up, reading at you know, at that age, anything with romance that had like a lot of angst to it, like longing where their lovers are like ripped apart, so like, of course, like something like watering heights.

Speaker 2 16:03

When I was younger, though, you know and I have three daughters, and it's what got me into thinking about picture books. I love, I love reading picture books with them, and you know it's, it's, there's something that's very touching. When you read up, you share a book that you remember reading, like I remember reading Frog and Toad with my parents and reading that with my daughters. That's so special. But also finding finding new books like Nuffle Bunny was really touching, because my daughter had a bunny that you know we had a similar experience with. The bunny was left on the airplane. I mean it's, it's really that's. It's a hard question and right there's so, there's so many amazing books.

Speaker 1 16:44

I did a school visit today where I was in a classroom in West Virginia and we were talking about. The whole thing was about animals, but at the end they wanted to because they had heard some of the podcasts. They were asking me questions like who's your favorite author? And I looked at it and said that is an impossible question to answer because that's like asking me which of my daughters is my favorite daughter. It's hard.

Speaker 2 17:06

Because there are so many amazing books that you wreck the men's right Exactly, and that's where I ended up taking it is.

Speaker 1 17:14

We talked about different authors and I asked them what they were reading and I think for me what was really reassuring about today. It kind of goes back to what you were saying earlier, that in this classroom in rural West Virginia this teacher had just filled it with books and she had diverse books and they were doing a.

Speaker 1 17:36

They were doing one of those book read offs where they were comparing, contrasting the books they thought should have been Caldecott nominees last year and the whole. I mean bins and bins of books. I thought I was bringing books into this classroom to share and I looked around, thought you've got it and it just. It gave me so much hope to go. Okay, this classroom kind of out in the middle of nowhere is surrounded with these beautiful books because this teacher is invested and this teacher has gone out and gotten the donations and found a way to bring these books to these kids and she has raised a classroom of readers. I mean it's amazing.

Speaker 2 18:15

It's so excited to talk about books so important. So, wonderful to hear.

Speaker 1 18:21

So what brings you hope these days?

Speaker 2 18:25

You know, I would say educators like the one that you just mentioned, right, and all the educators that we can contact with through the Latinx Pivot Book Festival. You know, everybody understands the importance of the younger generation and instilling them with their own hope and their own tools to succeed, you know, and books are so important and it's you know, I feel that it's really important that we try that everybody has to do what they can to help other educators, help the students, you know, just kids in general. I mean, I'm a pediatrician. I chose to go into a field where I'm serving children. I've always thought that, you know, the hope of the innocent, the hope of children is, you know, that's where we're all going to have our futures right. They are our future.

Speaker 1 19:19

Absolutely, and you know you mentioned that it takes. It took you at least seven years to get that first book published and I recognize all the work that goes into that and that seems about the number that most of the published authors I know have said. If you could draw a magic wand and look at the next five to 10 years, what would you hope and dream would be in the future for you?

Speaker 2 19:44

Oh, my goodness, I would say that my hope is to continue to publish. I have a bunch of my two daughters are going to college and applying to college and all of that. I'm worried that my life is going to be a little bit more complicated shortly, but I just I feel like I do have a lot more stories that I would like to tell and I just I just hope that there are people out there who still want to hear them and I'm sure there are.

Speaker 1 20:13

Well, thank you so much for joining us on the Adventures in Learning podcast. I will put both of those websites in the show notes and hopefully folks will find your books. Read your books, support the brand new one and support the Latinx kid lit book festival.

Speaker 2 20:28

Thank, you so much. Thank you again for having me. This is such a privilege to be here with you. This is so great. Thank you so much.

Speaker 1 20:50

You've been listening to the Adventures in Learning podcast with your host, dr Diane. If you like what you're hearing, please subscribe, download and let us know what you think, and please tell a friend. If you want a full show notes and the pictures, please go to drdianeadventurescom. We look forward to you joining us on our next adventure.