Virtual Author Visit with Saadia Faruqi

Last night our library hosted a virtual author visit on Zoom with Saadia Faruqi! Saadia is the author of the easy reader series, Yasmin, about a second grade Pakistani-American girl living her best life! She’s also the co-author of the upcoming novel A Place At the Table with Laura Shovan being published on August 11, 2020. And has another book – A Thousand Questions being published on October 6, 2020.

I met Saadia a couple of years ago on Twitter. She reached out to me about appearing on her podcast with Ann Braden – Lifelines: Books That Bridge the Divide. You can learn about my experience being interviewed in my first ever podcast!

Virtual Author Visit

If you haven’t tried a virtual author visit yet, it actually worked out really well! Saadia was able to share her screen and do a complete PowerPoint presentation. She read aloud from one of her newest Yasmin books – Yasmin the Writer. And finally answered questions from our audience.

I think we ended up with about nine families joining us for the progam, but had almost 20 sign up. It’s definitely a little bit harder to get people to a virtual event than an in-person event. I think a smaller audience helped in this situation as a few of the kids had a couple questions and Saadia was so kind to answer them all!

Saadia spoke about what it takes to be a writer and that ideas are great, but finding the best idea is important. Then, you must write and revise over and over again to polish the story. Plus, as a writer, you have to read a lot of books so you understand how stories are put together.

What I loved most was that Saadia talks a lot about her identity. She spoke about how part of that identity is that she is Pakistani-American, an immigrant raising first-generation kids in the U.S. We have a large South Asian population in our area and I was so excited that our audience could relate to her in that way. Many families who live in our service area regularly travel to India to spend time with extended family members during summer vacations.

Representation within stories is something I talk about a lot, but for kids to see that there are writers out there that look like them or their parents, or other family members is important too.

Additional Thoughts

I’ve got an ARC of A Place at the Table and I’m so excited to dive into it! I’ve moved it up my TBR list and hope to get a chance to read it this weekend!

Now is a great time to reach out to authors and illustrators to try out a virtual event! Authors and illustrators had to cancel so many events because of the coronavirus. Some authors will even offer a 20-minute virtual visit for free. But if you can pay them even a little, that’s better!

If your library (or your family) is interested in learning more about authors and illustrators, you can even take a look at things like the Everywhere Book Fest. It was held back in May, but includes all of its content for free on YouTube.