Keila V. Dawson is an award-winning children’s author. She is a co-editor and contributor to No World Too Big: Young People Fighting Global Climate Change, No Voice Too Small: Fourteen Young Americans Making History, and the forthcoming No Brain the Same: Neurodivergent Young Activists Shaping Our Future. She is the author of Opening the Road: Victor Hugo Green and His Green Book, Yumbo Gumbo, and The King Cake Baby. A New Orleans native, Dawson has also lived and worked abroad in the Philippines, Japan, and Egypt. She lives in Cincinnati, Ohio. Follow her on her website, Facebook, Instagram, and Bluesky.
1. How did you begin your journey as an author?
My journey as an author began with a dare! A friend asked about my bucket list and I said I had always wanted to write a children’s book. I’ll never forget my friend telling me to “just do it.” But could I? First, I needed an idea. And one day when making a king cake to celebrate the Mardi Gras season, I couldn’t find a little plastic baby to hide inside and voilà! I had an idea to write a runaway tale set in my hometown of New Orleans. After joining a local SCBWI group to learn how to write a children’s book, get critiques from established writers, and learn about the industry, that idea became my first published book.
2. If you could be any character in a book, who would you be? Why?
If I could be any character in a book, I’d be Harold from Harold and the Purple Crayon. I had quite the imagination as a child, so I definitely identify with Harold’s curiosity and his adventures in all his books. My curiosities about the world led me to live and work in different countries and learn about different cultures. My adventuring spirit continues with a love of travel. But we all know adventures in travel or life, like this writer’s life, are not without challenges or setbacks. From Harold’s character, we learn when things don’t go as planned, or when faced with a problem, imagination and faith in ourselves can help us get us to where we want to be.
3. How many revisions did your most recent manuscript, Yumbo Gumbo, go through before it became the story we can now read?
Because Yumbo Gumbo is a Charlesbridge Storytelling Math book, besides working with editor Alyssa Pusey on the story, I also worked with math research scientist Marlene Kliman from the educational nonprofit TERC. I learned a lot about what research shows how very young children think about math! There were about three revisions where certain plot points changed, word count decreased, and other adjustments where I had to fix the math to show the progression of a young child’s reasoning. The basic premise of the siblings arguing about what gumbo to have for dinner, voting unsuccessfully, and introducing the concept of least to decide a winner remained the same.
4. Where did you get the idea for this book? What was your inspiration?
Charlesbridge had a call for submissions for their Storytelling Math series, so I attended their webinar to learn about the series and what math concepts they were looking for. Because I am from Louisiana, I already had a couple manuscripts about gumbo, but they weren’t a good fit for this series. And I remembered a photo of my mother teaching my son to make gumbo when he was about 8 years old. That memory and photo were my inspiration. My imagination inspired the characters and story problem! Writing the sibling relationship was fun and brought back memories of my childhood as the youngest in my family.
5. What was the most challenging thing you faced while writing/researching this book?
There’s so much misinformation out there about Louisiana culture, gumbo, and our languages that I challenged myself to use accurate information from authentic sources. So I reached out to Choctaw and Louisiana Creole and Louisiana French linguists, researchers, and historians. Although Yumbo Gumbo is fiction, it was important to me to make sure my author’s note included what the historical record tells us about the dish we call gumbo and writing accurately about Louisiana culture from primary sources, and the guidance from experts — people who are respected in their fields of study of Louisiana history, food history, and languages. There was a lot of information to pack into that brief note, and I am grateful for their help.
6. If you read this book to a room filled with kids, what message would you want them to leave with? Who should read this book?
When I read Yumbo Gumbo at the Louisiana Book Festival, I think kids seeing their culture represented made them feel seen. On one spread, the siblings Annabelle and Beau are with their Mamí, Papí, Mom and Dad in the kitchen. The pages are filled with all the ingredients for gumbo. Together they clean, slice, dice, measure, and cook. Readers see children of color represent a culture that may be unfamiliar to them as they engage in a universally beloved experience of spending time with family, solving a real-life problem and navigating emotions as siblings do when they disagree. And 3- to 6-year-olds make decisions every day, so reading books that weave language, math, and social-emotional skills helps them become problem solvers, too.
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