A Love Letter, an Invitation and a Thank You to Toni Morrison: The Story Behind a New Picture Book (Exclusive)

Mar. 15, 2025

Danielle Allen; Little, Brown and Company Books for Young Readers

Before Andrea Davis Pinkney wasToni Morrison’s colleague, before they became friends, before the literary giant was her mentor, Morrison’s books graced the shelves of her childhood home. It wasn’t until much later that she discovered just how much the two had in common.

“I grew up in a family where literature was front and center,” Davis Pinkney tells PEOPLE. “Our stories are very parallel. Toni Morrison found power and joy and agency in telling stories and in sharing narratives, and in cultivating and embracing the oral tradition that is core to Black expression. And I had a similar upbringing.”

Both women integrated their first grade classrooms. Both grew up steeped in the “stories, history, musicality, rhythm, syncopation” that made up the “ingredients of great storytelling.” And those stories, Pinkney shares, “helped Toni Morrison, as a child, express herself and me as a child, express myself.”

Little, Brown and Company Books for Young Readers

“To me this is a praise poem. It is my love letter,  an invitation and a thank you to Toni Morrison,” she says. “It was important for me to let young people in on the fact that Toni Morrison, like themselves, was a child. She had a stick of chalk that she used on the sidewalk and drew and came to know her own storytelling power.”

Pinkney also wanted the book’s structure itself to serve as an experience, so children and the adults who read it with them feel like they’re in conversation with the book’s legendary subject.

“The beauty of a picture book is that you can engage with a child,” she explains. “You can read aloud, you can experience it together, and and the power of a great picture book also is that there’s a visual story that is being told that is punctuating what we’re reading on the page.”

And thanks to Minter’s “kaleidoscope of bold expression that really to me is a visual tribute,” the author considers the book both “a jewel and a tool.”

‘It’s a jewel, because it’s beautifully illustrated. It is evocative. You can pore over those paintings all day. You can find stories within the visual," she says. “And it’s a tool because it allows parents, caregivers, folks who are engaging with children to say, ‘This is the great towering legacy of Toni Morrison. Let me tell you, young person, what she did, and the stories that she told, and why her canon of literature still endures today, and why, when you’re older, you will read some of her works, and you will find your own story in some of the narratives that Toni Morrison created.'”

Toni Morrison.Deborah Feingold/Corbis via Getty

If the book’s subject, who died in 2019, could read it today, Pinkney thinks she’d be pleased with it too. “One of the last conversations I had with her was about the importance of books for young people, and it would be my hope that she would embrace and share, and invite a whole new generation of readers to picture books, but also to her work as well,” she says.

“And that would be my hope that she would say to those of us who create books for young people, this is the precisely the moment where what you do is important and needs to be done a hundredfold,” Pinkney adds. “And She Was Lovedis really for any reader that likes a good story. That likes to read aloud, that likes music, syncopation, joyousness, conversation around what they see on the pages. Anyone who loves beautiful art, and anyone who wants to be inspired and illuminated.”

And She Was Lovedis on shelves now, wherever books are sold.

source: people.com