Ashley Bryan

An introduction to the life and career of the writer and artist Ashley Bryan, a three-time winner of the Coretta Scott King Award.

Words to My Life's Song

Kim Tyo-Dickerson

What is beautiful to me about this deceptively rich picture book memoir, aside from the glorious illustrations and examples of Bryan's found artwork, are the ways he connects his childhood passions with his adult passions. It's the story of someone who always recognized and valued himself. Like the sea glass and bleached bones he scavenges from the shores of his home, nothing is lost or wasted in his life. Everything has a purpose for his art, there is beauty and meaning in every experience. For example, he traces a loving, organic path from his Kindergarten classroom where his teacher helped her students create little handmade ABC books and become authors in their families to the little handmade book he creates for Pablo Casals years later in France, full of sketches of Casals rehearsing for concerts to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the death of Bach. Such a little thing, a tiny book in tiny hands, gave him a powerful touchstone for his life and evolved into a storied publishing career. Through it all, his devotion to his family, his parents and his siblings and his nieces and nephews that he helps raise, centers him in a global world where monumental change, the Depression and World War II, often tore families apart. Families everywhere will love turning the pages in this book, finding so much to pore over in his illustrations and so much to think about when he describes being the only black child in his local church, the only black art student at art school, all the myriad of ways in which race impacted his life, including his ability to get home at the end of the war when only a certain number of black soldiers were allowed to join the legions of white soldiers leaving Europe. Through it all Bryan radiates a calm conviction that he mattered and his art mattered. And so he never gave up, pursued every opportunity that he had to find a way to make art full time. This memoir may very well be a touchstone for artists young and old, inspiring them to never give up either.

Ashley Bryan Words to My Life's Song