Lift Up Your Voice: Author Cynthia Leitich Smith Visits OES

Best-selling and award-winning author Cynthia Leitich Smith spoke at OES on May 26. Smith is the author-curator of the Native-centered Heartdrum imprint at HarperCollins Children’s Books. She is a writing teacher and a NSK Neustadt Laureate. Smith is a member of the Muscogee Nation.

Smith first spoke with second- through fifth-graders in the Lower School library. She shared that while growing up, she was shy and had an active imagination. She always had her nose in a book and loved going to the public library. She discovered that she liked to write and became a student journalist.

After getting her degree in journalism at the University of Kansas, Smith went on to earn a law degree from the University of Michigan. But later she decided she wanted to become a writer. As a young reader she’d realized there were no contemporary books for children with characters who were Native American. She wanted to change this.

“We get to know each other and ourselves through stories,” Smith said. Her first book, Jingle Dancer, tells the story of a young Muscogee-Ojibwe girl who wants to jingle dance at the next powwow. She asks various women in her family if she can borrow their jingles, celebrating much about her culture along the way.

Smith talked about the cover art from several of her books with the students—such as Indian Shoes, Rain Is Not My Indian Name, Ancestor Approved, and Sisters of the Neversea—offering the stories behind the stories and showing them how the cover illustrations have been updated to show more modern depictions of Native Americans.

Though the children enjoyed seeing the familiar book covers, their biggest reaction was to photos of Smith’s two rescue Chihuahuas, Orzo and Gnocchi, who drew lots of “awws.” Smith considers them her writing and editing assistants.

The students asked Smith questions after she spoke.

What is your favorite book?
“My favorite book is usually the one I’m working on right now. But Jingle Dancer is my favorite because it is my very first book and it’s dedicated to my aunt, who helped raise me.”

What books are you reading right now?
“Most of the books I’m reading haven’t been published yet. They are manuscripts that I’m reviewing.”

What’s your favorite type of writing?
“I love poetry. I got a little intimidated by poetry as I got older but then I realized, poetry is just playing with words.”

Where do you get the ideas for your stories?
“I get ideas from stories that I liked to read and stories I heard around the kitchen table. In my books, you hear the echoes of the voices of my loved ones. Their love is coming through the words.”

What inspires you to write?
“My imagination. But if I could capture just a little bit of the imagination in this room right now and bottle it, it would fuel me for the rest of my life! But it’s your imagination, not mine. It belongs to you. So, use it, let it be a superpower and lift your voice up. It will inspire others to share their voices too.”

Smith later spoke to the whole Upper School, in the athletic center. The students wanted to know which newspapers she’d worked for (the Dallas Morning News and the Detroit Legal News, among others) and who she had interviewed. Her subjects have included George Foreman, Dolly Parton, and a young member of the British royal family (“Very gossipy,” Smith smiled).

With the older students, Smith shared more about what moved her to change her career.

She’d been employed doing legal work as a federal law clerk in Chicago for a time. “I was a good civil employee, but it wasn’t my passion,” she said.

Then one day in 1995 she was working in her windowless office when an email came in from then-vice president Al Gore. She paraphrased it, saying, “There has been a bomb threat to your building. You may leave early today, in light of what is happening in Oklahoma City, but please know it will be deducted from your leave.”

She thought, I have no ‘leave’—and what is happening in Oklahoma City? Smith emerged from the building to learn that the Murrah Building had been destroyed.

“I walked to a nearby park and sat staring at the water,” Smith said. “I talked to some ducks (they are great listeners) and I said, ‘Ducks, I need to live my dream. I need to lift myself up.’ She quit her job, moved to the more affordable city of Austin, Texas, and started writing part time. That led to the publishing of her first book. Now she is the author of nearly 20 books for young readers and the editor of dozens more. Her titles for teen readers include the newly released Harvest House.

The Upper School students also had a Q&A with Smith.

Have you ever abandoned a manuscript?
“Yes, I have. I once discarded a whole manuscript and only kept one element: a haunted carousel. I used that in a different book. It just goes to show, you may put something aside, but maybe you’re meant to come back to it later, further down the road.”

What do you do for fun?
“I like to go to museums, I’m a real dinosaur nerd. I also like to go to movies—movies that make me think, as well as big blockbuster popcorn movies. (I loved the original Star Wars movie growing up—I saw it 180 times!)”

What’s the best way to learn to become a writer?
“Read! Read, read, read and fill your mind up with words. Ask yourself, ‘What is the story of my heart?’”

Thank you to the OES librarians for coordinating this event, hosted by the Office of Equity and Inclusion. When Lower School Librarian Lora Worden learned that Cynthia Leitich Smith would be in Portland, she immediately reached out to Ms. Smith's booking agent to see if she could visit OES while she was in town. With a whirlwind effort from her team and OES's, they were able to put this event together in record time.

“Cynthia Leitich Smith's work connects so beautifully with second graders' exploration of what makes a changemaker and third graders' deep dive into representation in children's literature,” said Worden. “And, of course, her work as a writer, editor, and educator connects with the work that the Library Team does every day to encourage students to read diversely.”

Author visits are supported by donations to the OES Fund.