Through visiting schools as I shared my picture books, I discovered that kids were often quite fascinated by the whole idea of being allergic to animals. Like Maggie, I'm allergic to all animals with fur or feathers. Megan Wagner Lloyd: I wrote the script and Michelle created the art, and we actually teamed up before submitting the project to publishers.

Megan, what inspired you to write this story? And why did you want to make it a graphic novel for a middle-grade audience?

Together, Lloyd and Nutter have collaborated on Allergic, a graphic novel for ages 8-12, out now from Scholastic. Her work has been recognized by the Society of Illustrators, 3x3 Illustration, Creative Quarterly and more. Michelle Mee Nutter graduated with a BFA in Illustration from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Megan Wagner Lloyd is the author of several picture books, including Paper Mice, Building Books, Finding Wild and A Fort-Building Time. Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm On the website for the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, the Equal Justice Initiative (founded by Just Mercy author Bryan Stevenson) states that 'markers and monuments can help transform our national landscape into a more honest reflection of the history of America'-a sentiment reflected back on the pages of each of these incredible books on memory and memorialization. O'Neill unpacks the many-layered history of physical memorials to Nathan Bedford Forrest, Confederate Army general, avowed white supremacist and first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. This understanding, it seems, is the crux of the argument for the removal of statues of Confederate Army generals across the U.S., a theme central to Connor Towne O'Neill's Down Along with that Devil's Bones: A Reckoning with Monuments, Memory, and the Legacy of White Supremacy. Essays and photographs reveal the ways in which these physical locations have been preserved (or not) and how that preservation (or lack thereof) has shifted our present-day understanding of past events. That connection between place and memory lies at the heart of Marked, Unmarked, Remembered, in which brothers Andrew and Alex Lichtenstein memorialize the physical locations of traumas throughout U.S. Despite the lack of physical structures to memorialize the place, however, Ali finds himself 'awash in remembrance' on visiting, which left me ruminating on the connection between place and memory long after I turned the last pages of Ali's powerful memoir.

Part of that remembering is tied up in his shock on learning that the small town in northern Canada in which he spent formative years of his childhood no longer exists. In Northern Light: Power, Land, and the Memory of Water, Kazim Ali meditates on the power of place and land, what it means to belong and what it means to remember.

Megan wagner lloyd books