Winter's Gifts Is Here!
an Indigenous celebration of nature
Friends,
My first children’s book, Winter’s Gifts, is here!
I am so excited to share this book with all of you, and have already started receiving messages about folks reading it to their kiddos, which yes, absolutely brings me to tears every time.
Someone even carved their Halloween pumpkin to look like Grandmother Moon! What a gift to see my words finding their way to your hearts.
The air is getting colder, we are lighting our fires and pulling out the hot cocoa, preparing ourselves for the coming season.
Winter can be hard for a number of reasons, and that’s why I’m so grateful to share this book with all of you.
What can winter teach us? It teaches us about rest, waiting, stories, and care.
I write in Winter’s Gifts that the dark of winter is like a hug.
And I know I’m not alone in searching for this vision of winter. Since the book’s release earlier this week, here are the (Amazon) numbers:
Top 20 in Children’s Native American Books
Top 50 in Children’s Books on the Seasons
Top 75 in Children’s Christian Fiction Books
#1 new release in Children’s Native American
#1 new release in Children’s Books on Seasons
Numbers don’t matter, but they do. To be an author means we have to, at the same time, let go of the numbers and trust that our books will find the right people, while also hoping that somewhere, people are willing to buy them and celebrate what we’ve put into the world.
It means so much to me that I can release an inter-faith, expansive spiritual book into these categories. I hope Winter’s Gifts finds children of many backgrounds and inspires them to love Mother Earth in beautiful and tender ways.
So, THANK YOU to everyone who has purchased Winter’s Gifts, who is waiting for it to arrive, who is considering grabbing a copy or two for a friend or neighbor.
Last night, I took some copies of the book to my climbing gym along with a batch of cookies as a little book launch celebration. Free cookies and books! It doesn’t get much better!
It is such a gift to share my words with all of my communities, including each of you. It is also Native American Heritage Month, and it is not lost on me that this is one of the first books from Convergent/Penguin/Randomhouse that includes Potawatomi words and a celebration of our culture.
So please keep buying Indigenous books! Keep celebrating our cultures alongside us!
What you can do:
Share the book in a #NativeAmericanHeritageMonth post on social media this month (and share again next month as the holidays approach!)
Encourage friends to buy it for the holidays
Order copies for yourself and friends
Request it at your local libraries, and if you are an outdoors person, at your local REI
Spend time making a plan for how you’ll celebrate Winter this year
As an extra gift, below is a PDF download of the book’s seek and find, which is a perfect addition to the book that kids can use to learn some Potawatomi words and engage with the book on a deeper level. You can even play Winter’s Gifts Bingo!
Stay warm, friends, and ease into Mother Earth’s gifts of winter as we welcome the chill in the coming weeks.
Ordering for my granddaughter for Christmas.
Congratulations 🎉 Can't wait to curl up with my grands and share!