The cover is in for my new book, All the Way to the Top: How One Girl’s Fight for Americans with Disabilities Changed Everything, has arrived! It tells the true story of how an eight-year-old girl lobbied for the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990 when it was stalled in Congress.

What did Jennifer do? She got out of her wheelchair and climbed the steps to the US Capitol. Cameras captured her every move. She vividly demonstrated just how inaccessible community spaces were to people with disabilities. Partly because of her, Congress finally passed the Americans with Disabilities Act. And because of the ADA, things changed. Today we cross the street at cut-away sidewalk corners, to to neighborhood schools with kids with disabilities, and work alongside people with all sorts of disabilities.

This is a debut book for the illustrator, Nabi H. Ali. I am once again in awe at how nonfiction illustrators use photographs to create totally new images that are still grounded in historicity.

Both Nabi and I benefited from getting to ask our questions directly to the subject of the book, Jennifer Keelan-Chaffins. She’s a grown-up now and worked closely with us on the text and the illustrations, making sure we got it right. She also wrote the foreword to the book.

I’m so excited for this book to hit the shelves, but it’s still more than half a year away. So I will just nurse that excitement until March 1, 2020. In the meantime, here’s a video of Jennifer talking about the Capitol Crawl. You can keep an eye on upcoming ADA commemorations here.

All the Way to the Top: How One Girl’s Fight for Americans with Disabilities Changed Everything by Annette Bay Pimentel, illustrated by Nabi H. Ali. (Sourcebooks: 2020).