Several new nonfiction picture books tell the stories of women making art.

Brave Ballerina is a biography of African American ballerina Janet Collins. It uses a predictive rhyming form:

This is the girl

who danced in the breeze

to the swoosh, swoosh, swoosh

of towering trees.

The language was playful and inventive, and the rhythm fun to read aloud. The back matter explains in more detail the events in Collins’ life that the rhyming stanzas refer to and also talks about the author’s own interest in the story. I loved the deceptively simple illustrations in the book.

Dancing Through Fields of Color is another book about women making art. This one tells about the inspirations and process of the painter Helen Frankenthaler. The book looks at her childhood inspirations and at how society pushed back at her as an artist. I especially loved the way the art evoked Frankenthaler’s love of color. The physical book is pleasant to hold–is it weird to say that I really liked the weight of the pages of the book and the non-gloss finish? It was a joy to physically turn the pages.

The third recent book about women making art is about Gwendolyn Brooks, the African American poet. At least half of the book is about her as a child and young adult, and I was especially delighted that the text included several of her early poems. Lots of books about writers mention the process of revision, but this book explored more deeply than most her experience with writing and rewriting:

Gwen toils to write one poem each day.

She deletes, rewrites, and starts again.

The simplest verse is a taxing struggle.

Draft three is better. Draft four is best….

Revised…revisions make poetry RING!

Women making art…ballet, paintings, poetry. It’s easy to envision these books reaching their audience and inspiring kids to make art, too.

Brave Ballerina: The Story of Janet Collins by Michelle Meadows, illustrated by Ebony Glenn. Henry Holt: 2019.

Dancing Through Fields of Color: The Story of Helen Frankenthaler, by Elizabeth Brown, illustrated by Aimee Sicuro. Abrams: 2019.

A Song for Gwendolyn Brooks by Alice Fay Duncan, illustrated by Xia Gordon. Sterling: 2019.