How my daughter’s Mo Willems biography report made me realize I don’t value my own work enough
My second grader was assigned a Great Americans biography project. To help her decide on a subject, we checked out biographies of Elizabeth Blackwell, Mae Jemison, Mary Cassatt, Victoria Woodhull, Sonia Sotomayor, and Maria Tallchief — great American women who made achievements in medicine, science, politics, and the arts.
Despite reading those fascinating stories, the Great American my daughter chose to write about was Mo Willems.
My first thought was that he is “only a children’s writer.” I wanted to tell her to choose someone more important. And that says a lot more about me that about him.
Willems has won six Emmys for his work with Sesame Street. He has three Caldecott honors. He won two Geisel Medals and Geisel honors five times. He has written and illustrated more New York Times bestsellers than I have manuscripts in my trunk.
He is far more accomplished in his career than I even hope to be in mine, so what does that say about how I value my own career as a children’s writer, with one novel published and one picture book to come? It shows that I don’t value my own career enough — I have internalized that I am “only a children’s writer.”